
Class 



-PT? .. ., CT 



Book T^.a 



PRESEXTliD HY 



l^\^cv 



MILTON 
AND JAKOB BOEHME 



A STUDY OF GERMAN MYSTICISM IN 
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 



BY 



vvy 



'A 



MARGARET LEWIS BAILEY ^ / 

(A.B. Cornell University 1903 ; A.M. University of Illinois 1910) 



THESIS 



Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements 
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German 
in the Graduate School of the University of Illinois 



NEW YORK 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

AMERICAN BRANCH : 35 West 32nd Street 

1914 



2. 



^^. 



Copyright, igi^ 
BY Oxford University Press 

AMERICAN BRANCH 



AUG 3 1914 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

The present study is the first of a series of monographs 
on Germanic Hterature and culture. As the title indicates, 
the plan of the series does not limit its scope to German 
literature, but includes also the literatures and civilizations 
of the peoples of kindred origin. 

While literature is usually considered the most perfect 
expression of national genius, it is, after all, but a portion 
of that full, pulsating life of a people which manifests itself 
in the entirety of their civilization. To understand literature 
one must take into account not only the resolves and inner- 
most strivings of the intellectual leaders of the time, but 
also the immediate and permanent effect of their work upon 
the life of the people. Nowhere does the close relationship 
between literature and culture present' itself more clearly 
than in the great intellectual movements which weave, like 
the Earth Spirit in Faust, the living garment of Teutonic 
civilization. The present monograph is an attempt to trace 
one of these mighty though little noticed movements, which, 
starting in Germany during the seventeenth century, sub- 
sequently, by devious ways, returns to its source. 

The science of literature should strive to comprehend and 
appreciate human life both present and past. Moreover, a 
general and live appreciation of literature is essential to 
progress in higher civilization. Or, as Carlyle has it, '' to 
apprehend the beauty of poetry clearly and wholly to acquire 
and maintain a sense and heart that sees and worships it, is 
the perfection of all human culture." 

America's joint heritage of English and German culture 

iii 



iv Editor's Introduction 

would seem to make this country a particularly suitable one 
in which to study sympathetically and broadly, but without 
national bias, English and German literature in their multi- 
ple and complex relations. Certainly it is in this field of 
comparative literature that American scholarship may hope 
to develop independence and originality. 

J. G. 



PREFACE 

The following pages contain the dissertation offered for 
the doctorate at the University of Illinois in June, 1912, and 
the results of the work accomplished under the Illinois Trav- 
eling Research Fellowship, 1912-1913. 

Through a study of the part played by Gottfried Arnold's 
Kirchen- tmd Ketzerhistorie in Goethe's intellectual life, 
my interest in mysticism and the Neoplatonic movement was 
aroused. I found that in the mysticism of Goethe I was 
considering only one slight manifestation of a tremendous 
world-power reaching far into all the spiritual realms open 
to the mind and heart of man. The conclusion seemed 
forced upon me, however, that the grave importance of the 
relation of the Neoplatonic movement to literature had 
been decidedly overlooked in our literary histories, both 
English and German. Especially did it seem incompre- 
hensible that a mystic who had such ardent admirers and 
so pronounced a following as did Jakob Boehme, from the 
time of the first appearance of his writings down to the 
new edition that is even now being published, should have 
had practically no accredited influence on the literary life 
that mirrored the great spiritual movements rising about 
the time of his activity. 

During my work in England, I found that the relation- 
ship of mysticism and literature had not been so unnoted as 
I had thought. I found Miss Spurgeon's illuminating chap- 
ter on " Law and the Mystics " in the Cambridge History of 
English Literature (chap, xii, vol. ix), published in the 
autumn of 1912. Miss Spurgeon herself called my atten- 



vi Preface 

tion to her Mysticism in English Literature just as it 
was appearing in the spring of 1913, for which I wish here 
to thank her, as also for several very kindly suggestions. 
In the main, however, the growing interest in mysticism 
seems, as in the Studies of Mystical Religion by Rufus M. 
Jones, 1909, and Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill, 19 10, 
to be along lines of religion, psychology, and history, rather 
than of literature. A systematic treatment of the connec- 
tion between literature, and Neoplatonism as a carrier of 
mystical thought, has not yet been. made. It seems not too 
bold a statement to make that we have here a most remark- 
able instance of an international and intellectual relation- 
ship, an eminently worthy subject for the study of compara- 
tive literature. 

The suggestion of a relationship between Milton and 
Boehme was made by Dr. Julius Goebel. To his unfailing 
inspiration and guidance I owe what results these pages 
have to show. 

The method I have tried to follow has little in common 
with the old method of careful and detailed comparison of 
the works of each author for possible resemblances, although 
some such comparison must of course be used as a checking 
up of any other method; it is rather an attempt to lay hold 
of the spirit of the time that produced natures so sympa- 
thetic and complementary as those of the simple, uneducated 
Gorlitz shoemaker and the cultured man of the world, friend 
of a rising republic. This method may best be characterized 
in the words of Dilthey : " It is the comparative method," 
he says, " through which the positive, the historical, the 
distinctly individual, in short, the individuation itself be- 
comes the object of scientific research. Even the scientific 
determination of the single historical event can be com- 
pleted only through the method of comparison on the basis 



Preface vii 

of universal history. One phenomenon explains another; 
taken all together, all phenomena explain each individual. 
Since the far-reaching results arrived at by Winckelmann, 
Schiller, and the romanticists, this method has continually 
gained in fruitfulness. It is a scientific procedure that was 
developed from the comparative methods of philology, and 
then transferred to the study of mythology. It follows 
logically that every systematic mental science must, in the 
course of its development, sooner or later, arrive at depend- 
ence upon this same comparative method." 

In the course of my studies in England, I was greatly 
indebted to courtesies extended by officials of the British 
Museum, Dr. Williams's Library (London), the Bodleian 
Library, the libraries of Queen's, Christ Church, Worcester, 
and Manchester Colleges of the University of Oxford, the 
collections of Magdalene, Trinity, and Peterhouse of the 
University of Cambridge, and the Library of the University 
of Cambridge. Particularly, I wish to thank Champlin Bur- 
rage, M.A., B.Litt., librarian of Manchester College, Ox- 
ford, for many valuable suggestions and Dr. Frederick W. 
C. Lieder of Harvard University for his kind assistance in 
reading proofs. 

M. L. B. 
January, 1914. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 



PAGE 





Editor's Introduction .... 




iii 




Preface 




V 


I. 


Introduction 




I 


11. 


English Mysticism Before Boehme . 




31 


III. 


BoEHME IN England .... 




57 


IV. 


Milton and Boehme .... 




115 


V. 


Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 






in Religious, Philosophical, and 


Po- 






LiTicAL Ideas 


. 


137; 


VI. 


Romanticism 


. 


170 




Bibliography 


. 


183 




Index 


. 


195 



INTRODUCTION 

To speak of the sources or influence of any mystical writer 
or movement seems paradoxical indeed, in view of the 
absolute independence and separateness of every individual 
mystical experience. Yet a certain relationship is clearly 
discernible among the exponents of purely personal religion ; 
their tradition, though not of forms and ceremonies, not 
bounded by the ordinary material facts of religious life, is 
nevertheless a tradition. They are not isolated phenomena, 
but are related to one another. The truths that they express 
can never age nor die. Each mystic, original though he be, 
receives much from the past ; each, by his personal experi- 
ence, enriches the heritage and hands it on to the future. 
Thus the names of the great mystics are connected, and 
around them may be grouped historical facts of religious 
progress. 

But the history of the period of greatest religious changes 
in England, the time of the great religious revival of the 
seventeenth century, when mysticism was most dominant 
and powerful there, is not a history mainly of a few tre- 
mendous personalities extending to the spiritual sphere 
man's conquest over his universe, but rather a history of 
an epoch when certain great spiritual ideas, certain far- 
reaching mystical truths, struggled for expression in every 
realm of human activity. It is a history, not so much of 
great mystics, as of very many mystically-minded men and 
women. It deals with a mystical atmosphere which many 



2 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

diverse elements united in producing, expressed by a very 
general experience of religion in its enthusiastic form, and 
running the gamut of experience from pure mystical ecstasy 
to a belief in magic, from regenerating faith in the Inner 
Light, through alchemy, Rosicrucianism, apocalyptic proph- 
ecy and other aberrations of the spiritual sense. 

The form of this mysticism is, like that of the most of 
Christian Europe, the Neoplatonism of which Plotinus was 
the greatest exponent. But Neoplatonism as a whole, and 
the mysticism which used its language, must not be identi- 
fied with one another. We find pure mysticism, it is true, 
in seventeenth-century England. But we also find a wide- 
spread revival of Neoplatonism. 

Many inconsistent elements united to form the semi- 
religious philosophy that goes by the name of Neoplatonism. 
Plotinus (a.d. 205-c. 270), Egyptian by birth, studied in 
Alexandria at a time when that city was the center of 
the intellectual world. He was a determined opponent of 
Christianity. The form of his thought is an advanced 
Platonic idealism, combined with the conception of emana- 
tion from the Hermetic philosophy, with elements from the 
Mysteries and from oriental cults, but the real inspiration 
came from his own deep mystical experience of ecstatic 
union with '' the One." From the age of forty he taught 
in Rome, surrounded by eager adherents. Appearing at the 
moment in which the wreck of paganism was complete, but 
before Christianity had conquered the educated world, his 
system made a strong appeal to the spiritually-minded, and 
also to those whose hearts thirsted for the mysterious and 
the occult. In his teaching of the existence of an Absolute 
God, the '' Unconditioned One," not external to anyone, but 
present in all things, he appealed directly to the mystical 
instincts of men, and to those living at the time of the 



Introduction 3 

greatest popularity of his system it came as a ready means 
of expressing their own vision of Truth. Hence early Euro- 
pean mysticism, Christian and pagan alike, is Neoplatonic. 

The influence of Plotinus upon later Christian mysticism 
was enormous, though mainly indirect, through the writings 
of his spiritual descendants, Proclus (412-c. 490), the last 
of the pagan philosophers, St. Augustine (354-430), and 
Dionysius the Areopagite, that unknown writer of the early 
sixth century, probably a Syrian monk, who chose to ascribe 
his priceless little tracts on mystical theology to Dionysius, 
the friend of St. Paul. Through these men the powerful 
genius of Plotinus nourished the spiritual intuitions of men 
and possessed, even into the seventeenth century, a final au- 
thority like that of the Bible or the great church fathers. 
The works of Dionysius were translated from Greek into 
Latin, about 850, by the great Irish philosopher and theolo- 
gian, John Scotus Erigena, one of the scholars of Charle- 
magne's court. In this form they widely influenced later 
medieval mysticism. 

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the tradition was 
carried on by the first great French mystic, St. Bernard 
(1091-1153) the Abbot of Clairvaux, and by the Scotch or 
Irish Richard of St. Victor at Paris; in Italy by St. 
^onaventura (1121-1274) and Thomas Aquinas (1226- 
1274), all close students of Dionysius.^ 

Under the influence of St. Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, 
and St. Bonaventura, the torch was lighted in England by 
Richard RoUe of Hampole (c. 1300-1349) and the short but 
brilliant procession of English mystics began. Rolle, edu- 
cated at Oxford, and widely read in mystical theology, be- 
came a hermit in order to live the mystic life to which he 

^ See Evelyn Underhill : Mysticism, pp. S41-62, for historical 
sketch of European mysticism. 



4 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

felt himself called. His writings already show the practical 
temper destined to be characteristic of the English school ; 
his interest is not philosophy, but spiritual life. Similar 
devotional treatises of practical instruction for the inner life 
are the works of Walter Hilton (died 1396), and of the 
unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who pro- 
duced also the first English translation of Dionysius, Dio- 
nise Hid Divinite, and the beautiful Revelations of Love 
of Julian Norwich (1343-c. 1413), with their devotional 
exposition of the mystical steps of purification, contempla- 
tion, and ecstatic union. From Julian to the seventeenth 
century there is practically no English representative of 
mystical thought. Spenser's Hymns (1596) would seem to 
carry on the tradition, but they are Platonic rather than 
mystical and curiously informed with the spirit of Puri- 
tanism. 

In Germany, the spirit of Plotinus lived in the mystical 
genius of Meister Eckhart and his two most famous dis- 
ciples, Tauler and Suso. All three were Dominican friars, 
all devout followers of St. Augustine and Dionysius, St. 
Bernard and Aquinas ; all lived and worked in or near the 
valley of the Rhine. Yet the contrast between the three is 
very striking. Eckhart (1260-1329) was like St. Augustine 
and Thomas Aquinas in that he was so strong, intellectually, 
that his mystical power is in danger of being obscured. He 
laid at once the foundation of German philosophy and of 
German mysticism. His pupil John Tauler (c. 1300-1361), 
friar-preacher of Strassburg, a man of great theological 
learning and mystical genius of a high order, was a bom mis- 
sionary, living only in his labor to awaken men to a knowl- 
edge of their transcendental heritage. His breadth of hu- 
manity was equaled only by his depth of spirituality. Hein- 
rich Suso (c. 1300- 1365), famous neither for his metaphysi- 



Introduction 5 

cal nor for his humanistic qualities, was a subjective, roman- 
tic mystic, deeply concerned with his own soul and his per- 
sonal relation to God. His autobiography seems impelled 
less by a desire to impart his doctrine to other men than by 
the essentially human impulse to leave a record of an inti- 
mate personal adventure. 

With these three men were associated less known person- 
alities, members of the great informal mystical society of the 
Friends of God, which sprang into being in Strassburg and 
worked courageously for the regeneration of the people in 
a time of corrupt and disordered religious life. From one 
of these unknown workers came the literary jewel of the 
movement, the beautiful little treatise known as the Theo- 
logia Germanica, " one of the most successful of many 
attempts to make mystical principles available for common 
men." 

Directly following these men and drawing their intellectual 
vigor from the genius of Eckhart, were the Flemish mystics 
John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), in whose works the meta- 
physical and personal aspects of mystical truths attain their 
highest expression, and Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), 
called *' another Dionysius, clear where the Areopagite is 
obscure," author of the exquisite Imitation of Christ 
(written 1400-1425). Through Kaspar von Schwenkfeld 
(1489- 1 561) the teachings of Eckhart and Tauler reached 
the people at a time when the fashion of sect formation and 
the branding of heretics was nearing its height. Through 
Sebastian Franck (1499-1542) the philosophical basis of 
those same teachings was assured. 

So far, we have been dealing only with the mysticism that 
has come down to us in the language and traditions of Neo- 
platonism. Several great mystics have been omitted from 
our list; they were of such a thoroughly original and spon- 



6 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

taneous character that they owed absolutely nothing to the 
formative influence of the writings of their predecessors. 
Othier men, generally spoken of as mystics, have likewise 
been omitted, because in reality they belong to quite a 
different side of Neoplatonism. Like Porphyry (233-304), 
they inherited only the philosophy of Plotinus. Thus it came 
about that two different views of life are represented 
by Neoplatonism, views radically different, yet often so 
similar that they seem to merge, for they often use the 
same language, instruments, and methods. These two views 
represent the two great human activities corresponding to 
the two eternal, elemental passions of the self, the desire 
for love and the desire for knowledge, the hunger of the 
heart and the hunger of the intellect for absolute truth. 

The hunger of the heart is expressed by mysticism, — not 
an opinion nor a philosophy, not a pursuit of the occult and 
the hidden, but first-hand experience and knowledge of the 
ultimate reality underlying all appearance. '' It is the name 
of that organic process which involves the perfect consum- 
mation of the Love of God ; the achievement here and now 
of the immortal heritage of man, the art of establishing his 
conscious relationship with the Absolute," ^ — in other words, 
the experience of Plotinus, Dionysius, Tauler, and the rest. 

For that other type of character in which the desire for 
knowledge dominates, the goal of ultimate truth means like- 
wise a knowledge of the supersensible world, but here it is 
a knowledge that must change into control. To this the early 
centuries gave the name of magic.^ In this the intense 

^ Evelyn Underbill : Mysticism, p. 97. 

^ One must bear in mind tbat tbe word " magic " as now generally 
used bas quite lost its original flavor and connotation ; love-philters 
and conjuring tricks have no relation to the serious and reverent at- 
tempts of bygone centuries to come into possession of a part of the 
power of the Infinite. 



Introduction 7 

human craving for hidden knowledge and for power, the 
deep interest in the occult, the mysterious, finds a place. It 
is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament 
seeking to extend its field of consciousness until it shall 
include the supersensual world. It is the quest for a power 
that may control the whole universe. Under this view, a 
line of Neoplatonic thought progressed that culminated a 
few centuries ago in what we now call modern science. 
Organized religion, in its forms and ceremonies, must always 
show traces of this magic ; modern therapeutic measures de- 
manding faith in a healer or a heightened power of the will 
are everyday expressions of the same fundamental concep- 
tion; and all of the sciences owe their birth to this magical 
way of regarding the relation of man to his universe. 

This intellectual interest in Neoplatonism, as opposed to 
the mystical intuition of it, had also its great exponents. Its 
period of influence begins with the founding in Florence of a 
Neoplatonic academy. Under the patronage of Cosimo de 
Medici (1389-1464), Marsilius Ficinus (1433-1499) made 
masterly translations of Plato and of Plotinus and various 
other Neoplatonists. He interpreted Plato entirely accord- 
ing to the spirit of Plotinus and consciously attempted to 
bring their philosophy into accord with Christian doctrine. 
Ficinus taught that the divinity of the soul was assured by 
its immeasurable power to will and to know; fostered and 
uplifted by religion and philosophy, the soul should ascend 
the heights of knowledge even to the summit of divinity 
itself, and part of the way thereto might well be learned 
from those elements of Plotinus's teachings that were of 
Egyptian origin, from the writings of Hermes Trismegistos, 
father of magic. It was in this atmosphere of intellectual 
progress of the academy that the great artists of the Renais- 
sance lived and worked. Although later the academy fell 



8 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

under the displeasure of the church, its influence continued 
increasingly. 

Pico de Mirandola (1463-1494) dedicated his life to the 
dissemination of these principles. Following his belief that 
they came originally, in part at least, from the Orient, he 
made a study of oriental languages, and to the teachings of 
Plotinus and Hermes added the kindred ones of the Ka- 
balah. 

This was the first introduction to the Christian world of 
the cabalistic writings, that collection of supposedly ancient 
Jewish tradition committed to writing some time in the 
second century of our era. Here again we meet the doc- 
trines, familiar to us from Neoplatonism, of the emanation 
of the soul from God, of the essential harmony of all things, 
of the archetypal world of which our world is a copy, — 
doctrines that lie at the foundation of the belief in magic, 
the belief in a spiritual alchemy powerful to effect great 
changes beneficial to the life of man. Significant for the 
progress of these ideas was the German humanist who came 
under the influence of the academy at Florence and returned 
home to carry on in his own country the mission of Pico de 
Mirandola. This was Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), with 
his writings on the Kabalah and the cabalistic art. 

In its beginnings, magic appears as the office, or art and 
science of priests; closely related to the art of healing it 
was naturally considered the receptacle of hidden wisdom, 
the knowledge of higher, of supernatural powers, such as 
spirits sometimes possess and sometimes communicate to the 
favored of mankind who know how to come into harmony 
with the forces of the universe. But this borrowing of 
power might arise from either a good or an evil purpose, 
just as spirits themselves are either angels or devils, servants 
of light or servants of darkness. Hence the distinction 



Introduction 9 

between white and black magic that Mirandola felt con- 
strained to make. " One of the chief complaints against 
me/' he says in his Apology,^ " is that I am a magician. 
But have I not myself differentiated a two-fold magic ? One 
sort which founds itself entirely upon the help and co- 
operation of evil spirits and most decidedly deserves aver- 
sion and punishment, and the other sort, magic in its true 
sense. The former subjects man to evil spirits, the latter 
makes him their conqueror; the former should be called 
neither an art nor a science ; the latter embraces the deepest 
secrets, the investigation and knowledge of all nature and 
her powers. In assembling and calling forth the powers 
spread by God throughout the universe, true magic per- 
forms no miracles but rather comes to the assistance of 
Nature in her activities ; it investigates the relations or sym- 
pathies of all things, it applies to each thing a most powerful 
attraction and thus draws from the deep and secret treasure 
chamber of the world wonders usually hid from mortal 
view, just as if it were of itself the originator of them. Re- 
ligion teaches us the contemplation of divine wonders; as 
we learn to know natural magic aright, we are still more 
compelled to say: full are the heavens, full is the earth of 
the majesty of Thy Glory ! " 

But the powers of nature and of man that were the legiti- 
mate object of the researches of science, that is, of " white 
magic," had been throughout the centuries a profound 
mystery, a matter of faith and foreboding, and whoever 
sought to learn anything of them, sought also to keep his 
acquirements secret, or to share them only with the initiated. 
Some men purposely shrouded their knowledge in obscurity 
in order to appear the greater and wiser, expressing in 

* Quoted on p. 85, Carriere : Die philosophische Weltanschauung 
der Reformationszeit. 



lo Milton and Jakob Boehme 

symbols that which they themselves understood only par- 
tially, hiding what remained hidden from them because their 
insight and experience of laws and relationships was in- 
complete. Thus there arose a tradition of knowledge and 
powers that never existed, and the shady side of magic, 
charlatanism of every kind, conscious or unconscious, was 
protected. The philosopher's stone, originally the symbol 
of that power beneficent to mankind to be achieved through 
union with the divine world-power, came more and more to 
mean merely the means of transmutation of baser metals 
into gold. The belief in astrology, in witchcraft, in every 
kind of divination and prophecy flourished. 

Against this degradation of the Neoplatonic tradition, 
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1487-1535) labored, 
especially in his last and ripest work, De occulta philo- 
sophia, which is directed toward establishing the principles 
of true magic against the superstitions of his time. But like 
the other learned men of his time, he believed in the possibil- 
ity of the material philosopher's stone, the goal of the great 
medieval alchemists, Raimundus Lullus in Spain, Arnoldus 
Villanovanus in France, Albertus Magnus and Basilius 
Valentinus in Germany, Bernhard de Trevigo in Italy, and 
Roger Bacon in England. 

The man who gave new impetus and a new direction to 
these chemical experiments was Theophrastus Paracelsus 
von Hohenheim ( 1493-1541). In his life and writings some 
have seen so much that is wild and fantastic that they reject 
him as a mad charlatan, while others find so many splendid 
observations and discoveries by which the science of later 
times has profited, that they praise him as a purely scien- 
tific reformer, much in advance of his age ; both forget, how- 
ever, how thoroughly his own life, adventurous yet heroic, 
represents the manifold contradictory character of the life 



Introduction ii 

of his time, full of inspired beginnings, yet easily running 
into fanaticism. Paracelsus was greatest as physician, the 
servant and helper of nature, great also as philosopher and 
chemist. His medical system was founded upon philosophy, 
alchemy, and astronomy. In the Bible and the Kabalah 
he found the key to all secrets. He acknowledged the unity 
and harmony of all being, for God is the foundation in 
which all things, in their archetype, exist; he taught the 
power of the imagination in strengthening the will. For 
him the philosopher's stone signified a reformed and regen- 
erated world. The alchemistic hope of making gold from 
baser metals is one of the delusions of pretenders against 
which his writings sounded a constant warning. 

The warnings of Paracelsus were generally misunderstood 
by his followers, but his spirit of scientific progress finally 
found a congenial home in Johann Baptista van Helmont 
( 1 577-1644). Here the mystical and magical spirits met, 
for Helmont had been deeply inspired by the writings of 
Thomas a Kempis. A nobleman by birth, he very early gave 
up position and property to follow Christ; to be of utmost 
help in the world, he studied medicine and thus came under 
the influence of Paracelsus's writings with which he allied 
himself in teaching and investigation. In one important 
thing, however, he dififered from his earthly master — in his 
belief in a philosopher's stone by which quicksilver could 
be changed to gold. His son, Mercurius van Helmont, 
we shall meet later in England. 

All of these many demands for truth and knowledge, for 
first-hand experience in religion and science alike, were to 
Luther the helpful contribution of the ages in his struggle 
against the power of tradition. But with Luther, especially 
in his later life, the influence of mysticism was far from 
final. He became at once the conqueror and the conquered ; 



12 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

although he freed the church from the old yoke of tradition, 
circumstances compelled him to subject it at the same time 
to the new yoke of the interpretation of the Gospel, The 
need of inner freedom for mankind had not yet been satis- 
fied. 

To that end the work of Kaspar von Schwenkfeld 
(1489-1561) was directed. Inspired by Tauler's sermons he 
eagerly welcomed Luther's work of reform. But Luther's 
ideas failed to keep pace with Schwenkfeld's, and the two 
men became absolutely estranged. The followers of 
Schwenkfeld in Wurtemberg and in Silesia finally formed 
a separate sect leading very devout, retired lives. In the 
seventeenth century they merged with the Boehmenists. 
Schwenkfeld taught that Christ gave to the divine likeness, 
hidden within mankind since the beginning, a clear mani- 
festation; that the Bible or external word bears witness to 
the inner word, Christ, the Spirit of God, within each human 
heart; and that the essence of true belief and faith is con- 
sciousness of the Christ within. 

Doctrines similar to these were held by Sebastian Franck 
(1499- 1 542), who sought to give to them an assured philo- 
sophical basis from the principles of Neoplatonism. As 
humanist, theologian, and historian, he was himself an 
epitome of the different elements of the reformation epoch 
in its teachings of freedom in every realm. Exile and perse- 
cution for heretical opinions in no way lessened his demand 
for religious toleration, even for papists, Jews, and Turks, 
or made him less steadfast in his witness for the " inner 
light." 

This spirit of mystical theology we find also in the works 
of Johann Arndt (1555-1621), who enjoyed the unusual 
reputation of completing the work of Luther and of being 
a heretic as well. From his pastorate in Badeborn in Anhalt, 



Introduction 13 

he was dismissed, 1590, for objecting to Calvinistic innova- 
tions in the Lutheran church; 1618, he was denounced as a 
heretic by Lutheran church officials.^ His work on True 
Christianity ^ was a popular treatise Hke Thomas a Kempis's 
Imitation of Christ, upon which, with the addition of the 
sermons of Tauler and the Theologia Germanica, it is 
founded, Arndt made no pretense of formulating a system 
of theological doctrine; he hoped merely to give rules for 
active, genuine Christian life at a time when the Lutheran 
church was overburdened with the letter rather than the 
spirit of the law. The highest good of life is a feeling of the 
beauty of God. There are three steps to its attainment : re- 
pentance, enlightenment, union with God through love. 
True freedom results from an utter denial of self, the giving 
up of will and all desire. The preached and written word 
of God has authority but no more than faith, the outgrowth 
of the inborn " inner light." 

Another supporter of mystical Christianity against the 
dead religious life of his time was known in Valentin Weigel 
( 1 533-1 588), and particularly after his writings were pub- 
lished and spread broadcast in 1612. Weigel had studied 
Platonic philosophy according to the Neoplatonic interpreta- 
tion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, also the writings 
of Dionysius and Erigena. In him there was a union of the 
two traditions of the search for truth; to his study of the 
older mystics and to their teachings as transmitted by 
Schwenkfeld and Sebastian Franck, he added the study of 
natural sciences, astrology, alchemy, and magic, from the 
works of Agrippa and Paracelsus, both of whom were, as we 
have seen, indebted to the Jewish Kabalah. It is thus the 
reconciliation of a two-fold philosophy that we find ex- 

* Arnold : Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie , II, p. 115. 

^ Book 1 published 1605 ; that, with three others, 1610. 



14 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

pressed in Weigel's system : all facts of life are to be learned 
either through ardent study of the '' book of nature " or 
through the light of faith in a " still Sabbath," that is, in 
the absolute tranquillity of soul in which God speaks to 
men; a union of these two sources of wisdom discloses 
all secrets. Since man is the microcosm, a knowledge of 
self is the key to the knowledge of the world. The reality 
of all knowledge is in the observer or subject; the object 
is only the exciting cause of knowledge. But God is both 
subject and object, and since there is, inborn within us all, 
the spirit or " inner light " from Him, we can know Him 
and all things as well. Weigel taught that sin is any 
attempt to accomplish anything without God; that cere- 
monies, good perhaps as reminders of God, are in them- 
selves useless. He believed in the universal priesthood of 
man, and that God's prophets are simple people, not the 
highly educated. False prophets are those who preach the 
righteousness of war, or who denounce as heretics any with 
beliefs differing from their own. By no means has church 
or state any right to persecute for conscience' sake. It was 
on account of his agreement with these heterodox views that 
Arndt was called a " Weigelianer " and driven from his 
church. 

The similarity of Weigel's teachings and those of the 
Anabaptists is very striking; they practiced his theoretical 
demands for moral and political reform. The freedom that 
Luther had demanded in the spiritual realm, Karlstadt and 
Miinzer and their followers were demanding in the social 
and political realm. Karlstadt rejected the sacraments, 
teaching that faith itself is a power of God through which 
He speaks directly to the soul ; by realizing itself, the soul 
knows God. Miinzer was a devout student of Tauler, also 



Introduction 15 

deeply affected by the prevailing belief in the immediately 
approaching millennium. 

We cannot here go into the history of the extravagances 
and final destruction of many Anabaptists, as the followers 
of these men were generally called from their insistence 
upon adult rather than infant baptism. Failing as a social 
and political force, the movement lived on as a form of 
religious belief, which, founded wholly on inspiration as it 
was, naturally gave rise to many sects. Once started, in- 
spiration could not be controlled. In the main, however, 
according to one of their orthodox opponents,^ the various 
sects agreed to the following doctrines : they rely upon inner 
illumination, believing that God dwells bodily within them ; 
reject the preaching of the word of God and disregard the 
final authority of the Scriptures ; believe in " calmest tran- 
quillity " and ecstasy, in the manifestation of God in dreams 
and visions and in nature; reject the doctrine of the Trinity, 
the work of the Holy Ghost in men through the sacraments, 
the need of an atonement through Christ; and teach the 
three-fold nature of man, — body, soul, and spirit. 

In other writings of the time more even than in those of 
Arndt and Weigel, we find expressed this general feeling of 
the age, widespread among Protestant theologians and men 
of culture and education, that the Protestant reformation 
had failed.^ Why is it, they asked, if Protestantism is pro- 
gressing toward the goal set for it by the devout founders, 
why is it that men are becoming less devout, less moral in 
public and private life, less cultured even? Why is it that 
instead of one pope there have arisen in Germany many 
small popes? These men complained of a theology con- 

^Colberg: Das Platonisch-Hermetische Christentum, I, pp. 332- 

34- 
^ Opel : Valentin Weigel, p. 283. 



i6 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

cerned mainly with doctrinal controversy, of a literature not 
remotely comparable to that of Luther's time, of the need, 
in fact, of a thorough reformation of all relations in state, 
church, and society. According to the Fama Fraterni- 
tatis,^ the only hope for improvement was in the com- 
bined activity of closely united like-minded men. This 
strange mystical writing, half fairy story, half sermon, was 
absolutely congenial to the spirit of this anxious, fear- 
ful, yet hopeful time; it was full of ideas of fraternity and 
reform, of hopes for a greater unity among men, of a higher 
outlook to relieve the oppressed spirit, and, best of all, hope 
for the near future.^ The Confessio Fraternitatis R. C. 
ad eruditos Europae, 1615, continues the story and style of 
the Christian Rosenkreuz of the first writing, supposed 
founder of the order, and gives the rules and history of the 
society and its plans for the general reformation of church 
and state. It is true that these men believe in the possibility 
of producing wealth by means of the philosopher's stone, 
but they scorn such work in the light of their real task of 
redeeming mankind through true religion. The whole Rosi- 
crucian story is important as showing the feeling of the time, 
a decided interest in natural philosophy, the beginnings of 
science, along with a strong desire for religious freedom and 
a true inner spiritual life. 

A flood of Rosicrucian writings followed the Fama and 

^Allgemeine und General Reformation der gantzen weiten Welt. 
Beneben der Fama Fraternitatis, dess Loblichen Ordens des Rosen- 
kreutzes, an alle Gelehrte und Haupter Europas geschrieben, 1614. 

^ Opel, p. 288: "Das Jahrhundert ist erschienen, in welchem man 
das, was man vor Zeiten nur geahnt hat, endlich einmal aussprechen 
muss, wenn die Welt, die aus dem Kelche des Gifts und Schlummers 
empfangene Vollerei ausgeschlafen haben und der neu aufgehenden 
Sonne mit eroffnetem Herzen, entblosstem Haupte, und nackten 
Fiissen frohlich und freudig entgegen gehen wird." 



Introduction 17 

the Confessio and immediately the name " Rosen- 
kreuzer " was assumed by a host of pretended alchemists 
and swindlers of the time who were taking advantage of the 
general interest in alchemy and belief in magic which ac- 
companied the early study of the natural sciences. The third 
and last of the original Rosicrucian documents was the 
Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreuts, 1616. This 
was written by Johann Valentin Andreae as early as 1602 or 
1603 and helps to substantiate the now undoubted fact of 
Andreae's authorship ^ of the anonymous Fama and 
Confessio. It may also have been circulated in manu- 
script before 1616, as was the Fama as early as 1610.^ 
The spread of their writings in manuscript was the com- 
mon custom of the mystics and theosophical writers of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^ The Hochseit is 
more distinctly satirical than the other two; concerning it, 
Andreae said later that he had been carrying on a joke at 
the expense of the adventurous spirits of his time.* Pos- 
sibly it was published only after the effects of the other two 
had been seen. The frequent use of the word " curiosus " 
marks the fad of the time, the pompous delving into secret 
and magical arts. The Hochzeit really warns against the 
gold-making promises of alchemy and the magical teachings 
that promise a universal panacea.^ When Andreae became 
aware that his joke was being taken seriously, that the 
whole world was hunting for this non-existent secret order 
behind which all sorts of impostors were hiding, he showed 
the real underlying serious import of the whole Rosicrucian 

' Opel, p. 288. 

' Begemann : Monatshefte der Comenius Gesellschaft, VIII, p. 165 ; 
Opel, p. 288; Arnold, I, p. 1118; Hauck : Rosenkreuzer. 
^ Schneider : Die Freimaurerei, p. 87. 
* Schneider, p. 96. 
" Hauck : Rosenkreuzer. 



i8 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

idea, of which the Hochzeit had been only a too youthful 
expression, in his Invitatio fraternitatis Christi ad 
amoris candidatos, 1617. This invitation to all high-minded 
men to form a Christian society or brotherhood could not be 
accepted, however, by reason of the Thirty Years' War. 

Andreae (1586-1654) was undoubtedly one of the im- 
portant men of the seventeenth century. He might have 
been noted alone as traveler, linguist, educator, theologian, 
or author. In his many friendships his many-sided spirit 
might be traced ; to his inner circle he admitted not only 
such men as Arndt and Bernegger, Leibniz and Comenius, 
but men of high rank and members of humble guilds as well. 
His deep piety and moral earnestness are shown when, in his 
Menippus, 1617, he holds the mirror up to the abuses of 
his time, or when, in his Reipublicae Christianopolitanae 
de scrip Ho, 1619, dedicated to Johann Arndt, he expresses 
his true " Rosicrucian " plan in his description of the ideal 
Christian state and his suggestion of a world reform, or 
when he attempts to reform the church along lines of practi- 
cal devotion and obedience to the '* inner light." Although a 
true Lutheran, Andreae was deeply impressed with the stern 
morality of the Calvinists, while utterly repudiating their 
teaching of predestination. He was vastly in advance of 
his age in favoring sects wherever their teachings seemed 
better than those of his own church. 

In speaking of Andreae as theologian or educator, or as 
author of the Rosicrucian documents, we have not touched 
upon his real importance in this discussion of the spread and 
development of Neoplatonic doctrines. For that we must 
retrace our steps to the time of Marsilius Ficinus. 

The Renaissance saw the establishment in Italy of many 
Neoplatonic academies or free societies, following the ex- 
ample given by Ficinus and the Medici in 1440. The ideal 



Introduction 19 

of the academies was not so much the increase of knowledge 
of the Greek language and literature, as the spread of a 
belief in the oneness of all mankind with the universe, an art 
of living rather than a system of thought,^ based on the 
teachings of Christ and Plotinus. The church feared a 
dangerous rival in these teachers of humanity ; the members 
of the academies were branded as heretics and the academies 
suppressed. The ideas, however, did not die. The strong 
opposition on the part of the Lutheran church since 1525, 
and then of the Catholic church during the counter-reforma- 
tion, was offset in part by the toleration assured in the 
Netherlands after the beginning in 1568 of the struggle for 
freedom against the Spanish world-power. Under the pro- 
tection of the Dukes of Orange, the ideas of humanism came 
forth again, to gain still greater freedom in England under 
Cromwell, until the ideal of these humanists became identical 
with that of Cromwell, to make of England the protector of 
all Protestant nations until the time of the world-wide rule 
of Protestantism should come.^ 

In Italy, the original acadamies of the fifteenth century 
which had died out or been suppressed, were succeeded in 
the sixteenth century by many institutions of the same kind, 
in places where they had once been suppressed as well 
as in other places. By 1640 the fashion of founding 
these societies of voluntary membership, distinct from 
universities and schools, had reached its height. Masson ^ 
speaks of some that were then " mere fraternities of young 
men, dubbing themselves collectively by some fantastic or 
humorous designation, and meeting in each other's rooms, or 
in gardens, to read, recite, debate. Others, with names either 

* Keller : Geistige Grundlagen der Freimaurerei, p. 15. 

* Weingarten : Die Revolutionskirchen Englands, p. 157. 

* Life of Milton, I, pp. 604-10. 



20 Milton and Jakob Boeh me 

grave or fantastic, had, by length of time and a succession of 
eminent members become public, and in a sense, national 
institutions. Among the most illustrious at this time were, 
in Florence, the Accademia Fiorentina, 1540, and the Acca- 
demia della Crusca, founded by seceders from the first; in 
Rome, the Accademia Amoristi. . . ." 

In Germany, Prince Ludwig of Anhalt, with others who 
had been in Italy, founded in 161 7 an academy on the model 
of the Accademia della Crusca, of which he had been a mem- 
ber since 1600.^ This " fruchtbringende Gesellschaft," the 
Akademie zum Palmbaum, became the parent of many simi- 
lar German academies, such as the " Auf richtige Gesellschaft 
von der Tanne," the " Gesellschaft von den drei Rosen," the 
Pegnitz society, the Academia Indissolubilis. Very little 
was generally known regarding these societies. Their real 
names, the fact of their origin in Italy, and their purpose 
were kept secret; they announced as their program the 
cherishing of praiseworthy virtue and the knowledge of the 
mother-tongue. 

Another of the Germans whose life had received new 
inspiration from his Italian journey was Johann Valentin 
Andreae. His plans for the furtherance of true Christianity 
in the spirit of Johann Arndt and his Four Books of True 
Christianity, for the increase of true philosophy and science 
and for the carrying out of these designs by means of a 
brotherhood of like-minded men, took form under the seri- 
ous purpose of the youthful Rosicrucian writings, which he 
now ridiculed and opposed. Only those men blinded by a 
too powerful interest in wresting the secrets from nature 
would have overlooked in the Fama Fraternitatis the 
call for a world reformation in religion and education, for 
a union of all confessions and a cessation of quarrels in the 
^ Monatshefte der Comcnius Gesellschaft, IV, p. 11. 



Introduction 21 

name of religion, for an understanding that truth may well 
belong simultaneously and under varying aspects to all na- 
tions, — in a word, the demand for toleration. In his later 
writings directed toward the formation of a Christian 
brotherhood for philosophical and scientific research, 
Andreae brought forward these same serious considerations, 
considerations which men like Robert Fludd very largely 
overlooked in their interest in defending the Rosicrucian 
fraternity (nicknamed by Andreae the *' invisible brothers ") 
because they were led astray by the too appealing alchemical 
profnises of Frater Rosenkreuz. Andreae's plan came from 
the '* living conviction that the strength of the individual 
was insufficient, under the too generally prevalent conditions 
of decline in every realm of human activity, and that since 
a rescue from the scientific, moral, and religious barbarism 
of the time must be sought it could only be found in the 
union of men who, animated by like Christian zeal, might in 
many different localities at the same time, fan the holy 
flame of faith, of love, and of knowledge and in their en- 
deavor be ever strengthened by the consciousness of a 
great and united striving toward these noble ends." To 
this group of Andreae's writings belong Invitatio fra- 
ternitatis Christi ad amoris candidatos, part one 161 7, 
part two 1618; Christianae societatis idea and Christi- 
ani amoris dextra porrecta, 1620. This society of scholars 
and Christians called at first '* Civitas solis," then " Societas 
Christiana " or " Unio Christiana," for which many of 
Andreae's friends were ready, was not organized because 
these friends were separated and scattered by the Thirty 
Years' War. This destruction of his hopes, Andreae 
laments in a letter to Comenius, 1629, expressing his 
real purpose in the following words : " Our aim was to 
restore Christ to his proper place and to combat the idols 



22 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

of science and religion." ^ Among these friends of 
Andreae's were many whom we find later in other human- 
' istic societies : Wilhelm von der Wense and Tobias Adami, 
pupils of Campanella, Johann Kepler, discoverer of the laws 
of planetary motion, Matthias Bernegger, Joachim Jungius, 
Theodor Haak, Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, and Comenius. 
That these various societies had deeper motives than 
those generally ascribed to them is certain. The Italian 
academies, after the pattern of which the " Order of the 
Palm " was founded, must have been, to a certain extent at 
least, secret societies, since neither their organization, their 
symbolism, their forms, nor the list of membership was com- 
municated to outsiders, and their real aims were concealed 
while publicity was given to purposes of a genuinely innocent 
and popular nature.^ That the German organizations were 
not the mere language societies they were generally con- 
sidered is apparent when we look at the activities of their 
members. They emphasized the study of the mother-tongue, 
it is true, but there was hardly a writer among them who was 
not also interested in the study of natural philosophy, in 
religion, in mathematics or astronomy, so much so, in fact, 
that to most of them clung the suspicion of heresy — that 
they were Rosicrucians and as such members of a religious 
sect highly dangerous to the church and liable of course to 
persecution. Members of the seventeenth-century academies 
were natural philosophers, reformers, theologians, educators, 
statesmen, poets, noblemen; such members there were, as 
Bacon, Giordano Bruno, Comenius, Robert Boyle, J. B. van 
Helmont, Campanella, Hugo Grotius, Leibniz, Oxenstierna, 
Valentin Andreae, Spanheim, Pufendorf, Opitz.^ Through- 

* Guhrauer : Joachim Jungius und sein Zeitalter, p. 64. 
'M. C. G., IV, p. 26. 
«M. C.G., XIV, p. 122. 



Introduction 23 

out the whole list of membership there runs a line of spirit- 
ual relationship in the fact of their tolerance for the beliefs 
of others, a tolerance remarkable for the seventeenth cen- 
tury. With this they united strict opposition to the scholastic 
method. They were seriously religious, even to the extent 
of being mystics, but they understood the essence of Chris- 
tianity differently from the ruling dogma. They treat 
not only of the relation of man to God, but of man 
to nature and of men to each other. For them a 
knowledge incapable of helping mankind had no value; 
a science shut off from the people in its language is 
useless; hence their emphasis of the vernacular. To make 
all knowledge fruitful for the education of the human race 
and thus lead the race on to a higher stage of development 
was one of their great ideals. Their turn for the practical 
led them on in their striving for a general reformation of 
the whole world. With their keen sense of the significance 
of fraternal organization, they formed unions which were 
intended to benefit the whole man and his whole mode of 
thinking, to influence his whole life. Their activities were 
in no way directed, as has been claimed, toward '' childish 
play with symbols and signs but toward inclusive spiritual, 
religious, philosophical, and scientific aims," ^ the carrying 
out of which, in those times, could be accomplished only un- 
der secret organization. The difficulties under which they 
labored compelled them to proceed with extreme caution, 
concealing their real interests and exhibiting to the world 
only what they considered secondary. When the time and 
place is more propitious for a franker carrying out of their 
plans and purposes of reform, we shall find them in a 
country of larger opportunity; we shall find them in Eng- 
land. 

^ M. C. G., XVI, p. 234. See also IV, pp. 26, 29. 



24 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

In the meantime we must go back to the beginning of a 
new power, that is, to the renewal of the same old power 
under the guise of a new prophet in whose teachings the 
desire for reform, educational, ecclesiastical, political, min- 
gled with the highest form of mystical religious thought, 
— the form in which Neoplatonism gained an expression in 
which its influence has reached the religion and literature, the 
science and philosophy of even modern times. This was in 
the writings of that giant of mysticism, the " inspired shoe- 
maker " Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), or Behmen, as he has 
generally been called in England. 

In his own day, Boehme was called by some " the Teu- 
tonic philosopher " or Teutonicus. A philosopher he must 
have been, for " from however many different standpoints 
after him the totality of things was viewed and whatever 
principles of knowledge were discovered, he had indicated 
them one and all." ^ Yet he was only an illiterate and un- 
trained peasant, — a peasant, however, who was gifted with 
a most marvelous and astonishing genius for the transcend- 
ent. He was born near the Bohemian frontier at Alt-Seiden- 
berg near Gorlitz. He had a little instruction in reading, 
writing, and religion at the village school. As a child he was 
quiet and thoughtful, living in imagination in a world of 
German goblins and fairies. Wonderful visions came to him, 
to his excited fancy taking the form of external occurrences ; 
such was doubtless his experience, during his apprenticeship 
to a shoemaker, of talking with the stranger who predicted 
his future greatness and sufferings. Dismissed on account 
of his gentle, yet too insistent piety, he finished his training 
under various masters. On his wanderings he observed with 
sadness the enmity existing between churches and even with- 
in the church itself. He read religious and astrological books, 

* Carriere, I, p. 310. 



Introduction 25 

works by Schwenkfeld and Sebastian Franck, Paracelsus and 
Weigel among others, and prayed ardently for an indwelling 
of the Holy Spirit. In due time he became master-shoe- 
maker and married in Gorlitz. Outwardly, he lived a quiet, 
hard-working life ; inwardly, he lived in a glory of illumina- 
tion and revelation. The mysteries revealed to him he tried 
to explain, but he had no trained medium of expression. 
He must ever be rediscovered and reinterpreted. 

At critical times in history, at times of greatness in 
science, art, and moral actions, forces that are working 
generally among men break forth powerfully and suddenly 
in the case of individuals. The form and content of the 
experience is largely dependent upon the character of the 
individual, yet so opposed is it to the usual experience of his 
ordinary life, that he is almost forced to regard it objec- 
tively, as if it were Happening to another ; it bursts without 
reflection from the depths of the soul, and seems like a gift 
from on high. Such enthusiasm of knowledge or creation 
appearing suddenly, especially to an unprepared person, re- 
sults in a condition often passing into ecstasy ; it utterly over- 
whelms the body as Plotinus explains, to whom the experi- 
ence came as it did to St. Paul, and as it has to many another 
mystic. Such insight into nature and God came likewise to 
Boehme. After his third experience of this sort, he began 
to write Die Morgenrbthe im Aufgang, simply for him- 
self as a memorial. Once known in manuscript^ under the 
name Aurora given to it by a friend, this book raised 
bitterest opposition among the clergy; at the same time it 
won friends among scientists and philosophers who encour- 
aged him to continue writing. With training in self-expres- 
sion and an environment of encouragement instead of con- 
tinued persecution, Boehme might have been the very man 
fitted to complete Luther's half-finished work of church- 



26 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

reformation and to bring about a reconciliation between 
science and faith, such as we are still lacking in our day. 

The Aurora was never finished. It would doubtless 
never have been a clear statement of Boehme's system. That 
comes out much more clearly in his later works. He be- 
lieved, with all mystics, in the ultimate unity of the nature 
of God and all things, but he emphasized particularly the 
characteristics of trinity in this unity, which comes from 
his fundamental assertion that all manifestation necessitates 
opposition. This law of opposition is uniform throughout 
all existence, physical and spiritual alike. He also insists 
upon the doctrine of rebirth, which the earlier German 
mystics had loved, the regeneration or being born in God, 
which is a consciousness of the " inner light." 

Boehme starts with the Godhead, the abyss out of which 
all being issues; it is the primordial condition of all being 
and therefore without substance, natures, or qualities; the 
eternal silence, the All and the No-thing; neither darkness 
nor light; manifest to none, not even to Himself. This 
principle of all things, the divine, unlimited, indivisible ex- 
istence or ultimate unity, in its desire for self-expression or 
manifestation, includes within itself the Trinity: Love and 
the desire of love as the Son, and the expression of this 
love, the Holy Spirit. According to the law of opposition, 
when God, the triune principle or Will under three aspects, 
desires to become manifest, the Will appears as two ele- 
ments, affirmative and negative. An eternal contrast is thus 
discovered in God's own hidden nature. But the leveling 
and merging, the equalization and assimilation of the con- 
trast must follow. However, we are never to consider this 
trinity of the opposing wills and their struggle as a temporal 
process; Boehme repeatedly warns us that, on account of 
human weakness, he must describe as a time-process that 



Introduction 27 

which is eternal, and place side by side things which are in 
reality interdependent and joined with one another in perfect 
unity. 

This contrariety upon which the self-manifestation of 
God depends Boehme takes from the scriptural divine ele- 
ments of Love and Wrath. All further development and 
creation result from this contrariety. Thus the object of 
all manifested nature is to follow the path of the assimila- 
tion of the two opposing wills, the transforming of the 
" No " into the ** Yes.'* This is brought about by seven 
organizing spirits or forms. The first three of these, rep- 
resenting God's wrath, bring nature out of Chaos and 
darkness to the point where contact with light is possible. 
Boehme calls them harshness, attraction, and anguish; in 
modern terms, contraction, expansion, and rotation. The 
first two are absolutely antagonistic forces; brought 
into collision, they form an endless whirling movement. 
They represent, in fact, the three laws of motion, centri- 
petal and centrifugal force resulting in rotation. They are 
the basis of the manifestation of nature, the power of God 
without the love. The last three of the seven organizing 
spirits represent God's love. Boehme calls them light or 
love, sound and substance. They are spiritual forces and in 
them contraction, expansion, and rotation are repeated on 
a different plane. The first three forms give the material 
or strength of being, the last three, the quality; while the 
central or fourth form constitutes the pivot-point of both 
realms, common to the wrath or darkness and to the love or 
light. Thus there are these three omnipotent principles of 
life in the two forces and their resultant effect. They are 
often called by different names, as light, darkness, and their 
union which is the visible world, or good, evil, and life, or 
God, the devil, and the world. A continuous uniting and 



28 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

separating, an eternal attraction and repulsion, an ever- 
lasting love and wrath is necessary to life. This is the 
law of opposites. 

The practical and ethical character of Boehme's teachings 
is shown in what seems his attempt to harmonize the unde- 
niable claim of pantheism that God is not to be known out of 
and apart from nature but in it and through it, with the 
equally undeniable fact of the evident opposition in this 
divine world of good and evil. He cannot make light of the 
fact of evil and explain it away as merely negative, as the 
unavoidable shadow to the light, for it is vastly more than 
that. For him the solution of the problem lies very deep 
and becomes only possible by looking upon the human soul 
not as a mode of divine substance, nor as the work of the 
Creator merely, but rather as absolutely self-existent. In 
other words, good and evil, heaven and hell, are to be looked 
upon as opposed possibilities within the soul, in relation to 
which the soul possesses perfect liberty of choice and full 
independence from any external influence and from any pre- 
determined inherent condition; for even this is the deep 
meaning of the word free-will. 

The possible good and evil latent in God and therefore in 
the human soul, become actual only when the soul in its pri- 
mal freedom chooses the one or the other. The soul is not a 
being different from God, but, on the contrary, is funda- 
mentally the divine substance itself, inasmuch as it brings 
into reality the possible opposition between good and evil. 
Therefore our rebirth and salvation through the Christ 
within us are but a return to our own primal divine being, 
but it must come as an act of the will. Will or desire is, 
in fact, the root of all manifestation, of all life, the radical 
force in man as in nature and in the Godhead. Ever-con- 
tinuing creation is expressed in the human soul through 



Introduction 29 

thought or imagination ; out of these is born will and from 
will, actions. The state of our will makes the state of our 
life. Man as manifestation of God bears the seal of the 
Trinity in his three-fold nature; his soul from God, his 
spirit from the stars, his body from the elements. In his 
own realm he is the microcosm. Evil is any assertion of self, 
a turning away from God to independence apart from Him. 
It appears first as pride in the archangel Lucifer, in his 
selfish desire to be more than others. Man, created as a 
perfect being, was higher than the angels and greater than 
the fallen Lucifer, because he was complete. But he lost 
the inner divine wisdom from his nature by imitating Luci- 
fer in his desire for separateness from his origin, lost there- 
fore his completeness and was separated into the two sexes, 
under the forms of Adam and Eve. Hence marriage is 
holy, since only through union with his complementary na- 
ture can the individual hope to gain in part his birthright 
of harmonious completeness. 

The relation to his own times comes out clearly in 
Boehme's teachings regarding freedom of conscience, pref- 
erence for Christ's church invisible to churches " made of 
stone " with their learned but uninspired clergy, and expecta- 
tion of the speedy appearance of peace and harmony 
throughout the whole earth. He did not condemn the 
sacraments, but considered them simply outward symbols 
of the inner Christ, helpful according to the measure of our 
faith. He upheld the necessity of government until all men 
return to full freedom in God, but hoped for reform along 
many lines. War was for him an abomination. His obscure 
language and difficult symbolism^ also a mark of his age, 
have always made him extremely difficult to interpret. 
Readers of all times have been seriously disturbed by the 
prevalence of the confusing cabalistic and alchemical im- 



30 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

agery which is the result of his acquaintance with the works 
of Paracelsus. Troeltsch definitely states ^ that his system 
is founded upon impressions from Paracelsus, Schwenkfeld, 
and Weigel. He might well mention Sebastian Franck also. 
But whether because Boehme was a theoretical alchemist ^ 
or because of the curious fascination, particularly at that 
time, of his mysterious language and the vagueness of his 
directions regarding the search for the philosopher's stone, 
certain it is that many alchemists read his works with 
sincere and eager devotion and that this aspect of his writ- 
ings is thoroughly in accord with van Helmont and Robert 
Fludd. To us now it is beyond measure strange, the 
profound influence of this simple peasant upon such varied 
types of individuality as may be met in his train, — alche- 
mists and lawyers, learned educators and simple tradesmen, 
peasants and poets, preachers and philosophers. 

* Troeltsch : Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 
in Gesammelte Schriften, I, p. 898. 
^ Adolf V. Harless: Jakob Boehme und die Alchymisten. 



II 

ENGLISH MYSTICISM BEFORE BOEHME 

Of the three great factors uniting to bring about the 
sixteenth-century reformation, fourteenth- and fifteenth- 
century England had developed only one. After King John 
paid homage to Pope Innocent III as his liege lord, parlia- 
mentary legislation had been directed toward separating 
England from Rome. Opposition to the Pope was in Eng- 
land naturally enough political rather than religious. It is 
true that on the continent likewise the idea of an independent 
state had been taking definite form perhaps ever since the 
fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty; it had been strengthened 
by the opposition to the popes at Avignon ; at the same time 
the great church councils of the fifteenth century had every- 
where fostered the growing desire for national churches. 
But only in England was this shaking ofif of the foreign 
yoke and this subordination of church to state at all com- 
plete. This was Henry VUFs great reformation and Eng- 
land's first contribution to the reformation as a whole. 

But the other two great factors, the mystical and human- 
istic contributions to the reformation, were in England of 
minor importance. England had had no Meister Eckhart, 
no Tauler, no Thomas a Kempis, no Theologia Germa- 
nica with their sincere and heartfelt teachings preparing the 
hearts of the people for a radical change in their religious 
life. They had had no Luther, a leader of the people whose 
personality had been steeped in the devout and popular ele- 

31 



32 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

ments of German mysticism. Of themselves the English 
people were not ready for a change from dependence on ex- 
ternal authority to absolute autonomy. For in spite of the 
religious and devotional fervor of the English mystics from 
Richard Rolle of Hampole and his followers to Julian of 
Norwich, the English reformation had been merely political, 
and when the time came for a sweeping change in the inner 
religious life, not the English but the German mystics were 
generally read in England. 

English humanistic culture had a similar fate. Erasmus 
had taught there, it is true; but his influence hardly ex- 
tended beyond the nobility. Thomas More had expounded 
in his Utopia (1516) an ideal of a state in which ecclesias- 
tical hierarchy was unknown. But he finished his career as 
a powerful opponent of the reformation, and without found- 
ing any school of humanism. Henry VIIFs church had 
merely substituted upon the old established behefs and cere- 
monies, a royal for a papal head — the result of a royal act, 
not of a development in which the people had any real share. 
The bishops retained their old power in a system subjected 
to the growing dangers of multiplication of benefices and 
lack of interest on the part of a hireling clergy. The new 
Anglican church was naturally separate, yet related to a 
reformed church on the continent, and reformed, yet re- 
taining a hierarchical system. An opposition to its outer 
form might come as a further development of the political 
forces that had helped to produce it; upon its relation to 
the reformed churches of other lands must depend its inner 
development. 

In Germany the reformation was likewise incomplete; 
it was not carried to its promised and logical conclusion un- 
til in certain phases of Pietism it finally approached more 
nearly to the ideal for which Luther and Zwingli had 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 33 

striven.^ The subjectivity represented by mysticism meant 
freedom of the individual; the benevolent fraternity of hu- 
manism meant a free church of voluntary membership. 
Whereas in principle the reformers announced the sover- 
eignty and priesthood of the individual, in practice they sub- 
merged personal faith under an authority almost as rigid 
and unspiritual as in the system they were seeking to over- 
throw. Luther's ideal of " every man his own judge " was 
supplanted by his scholastic notion of the absolute depravity 
of man resultant from his fall ; his thought of the universal 
priesthood of man could not hold out against his inherited 
feeling of the necessity of a state church to root out heresy. 
The ideal of a church on the New Testament model was 
lowered to the standard familiar through custom and tradi- 
tion. As the Lutheran creed and dogma developed, freedom 
was more and more lost sight of, until speedily a church of 
fixed forms and beliefs had grown up. The letter-bound 
Lutheran orthodoxy represented a victory of one of the es- 
sential elements of religion over the other, the victory of the 
traditional over the mystical element, the submission of the 
ever-changing, personal, inspirational force to the perma- 
nent, unchanging, conservative force that binds the ages to- 
gether. For a state church, by its very nature, is bound to 
look with disfavor upon all purely personal religion. It is 
bound to disregard the fact that just as long as the two ele- 
ments — mysticism and tradition — are harmoniously com- 
bined, as long as organized religion on the one hand resists 
a strong tendency to settle into a sacred form or system, as 
long as divinely illuminated souls on the other hand do not 
exalt their own experience and ignore the gains of the race 
in the light of master-revelations of the past, just so long 
will religion remain ideal and powerful. This lack of bal- 
* Weingarten : Die Revolutionskirchen Englands, p. 442. 



34 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

ance between the two elements has caused the church 
throughout the ages to denounce the mystics, whom they 
have branded with varying names as time went on, as Simon- 
ites, Gnostics, New Prophets, Anabaptists, Paracelsians, 
Boehmenists, Rosicrucians, Pietists, Separatists, Quakers, 
Enthusiasts, heretics, fanatics ! 

The German reformation had not been entirely confined, 
as we have seen, to the work of the creed-makers. The lack 
of incentive toward the development of a truly devout 
spiritual freedom under the strict Lutheran dogma, the 
glaring inconsistencies of the great reformers, and the con- 
sequent need of a deeper reformation was keenly felt by 
the thinkers of the time who were likewise thoroughly im- 
bued with the leavening power of a belief in the Divine 
Presence.^ These men were a result of that acute and in- 
tense religious feeling — not necessarily confined to Chris- 
tianity — which puts emphasis upon immediate relationship 
to God, upon direct and intimate consciousness of divine 
inner light. Under the leadership of such men the growth 
of this mystical side of religion made great progress. It 
bore rapid fruit in the development of new religious forms 
or communities along with and also within the Lutheran 
church. But the German church of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, the political plaything of princes, could 
offer no place for the development of an institution fitted to 
this group of thinkers and their ideas, centered about free- 
dom. Naturally sects must arise ; also they must be perse- 
cuted and driven out as were the various Anabaptist groups. 
Divisions must arise within the church itself. In 1571, for 
instance, one hundred and eleven preachers were driven 
out of Saxony by Electoral Prince August. Later the 
Lutherans even united with the Catholics to drive the Cal- 
* Ritschl : Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 80. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 35 

vinists from the same territory. By the year 1600 the 
conscience of the counter-reformation had caused Austria 
and Bohemia to drive out thousands of their most indus- 
trious and law-abiding citizens. 

In Holland these fugitives found a home. During the 
struggle with the Spanish Inquisition, the Dutch leaders in 
1576 had united in a pledge of religious toleration. This 
struggle for freedom seemed to bring prosperity to the Neth- 
erlands ; her trade and industry developed amazingly. Un- 
conditioned freedom of trade and commerce kept pace with 
the freedom of faith, of science, and of the press, — a freedom 
which made of this one nation a refuge for the persecuted 
of all lands. In such a home the great religious movement, 
yet untouched in its depths by the German reformation, 
took form under the influence of German mystics, Baptists, 
and humanists expelled from Germany, and found its way to 
England, carrying the beginnings of the advanced liberal 
ideas of to-day. A great many Dutch weavers, who were 
permitted by Elizabeth to settle in England, " helped to make 
England Protestant, and thus laid a lasting basis for her 
wealth ; but at the same time they did even more than this ; 
for in helping to make her Protestant they also helped to 
make her free." ^ 

England's reformation century is the seventeenth, not 
the sixteenth. Not until the reign of the Stuarts and in 
the struggle against them does separation inward as well 
as outward from the Church of Rome become the affair of 
the whole nation, and the history of the English church 
the history of a spiritual and religious movement.^ There, 
amid civil war, the fundamental forces of religious freedom 

* Douglas Campbell : The Puritan in England, Holland, and 
America, London, 1892, I, chap, x, p. 429. 
' Weingarten, pp. i ff. 



36 , Milton and Jakob Boehme 

work out their destiny and in England the Protestant 
reformation reaches its final conclusion. 

As a continuous movement the English reformation may 
be said to begin in the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553), 
when Hooper declined to be consecrated as bishop under 
Catholic ceremonies. The name Puritan was first given ^ 
to non-conformists early in Elizabeth's reign (i 558-1603), 
to those who, continuing the opposition to ceremonies and 
the wearing of church vestments, yet remained within the 
church. During the persecution under Mary (1553-1558) 
many fugitives had found shelter in the reformed countries 
of the continent, particularly in Germany and Holland. In 
the churches in Zurich, Strassburg, Frankfurt-am-Main, 
and other places their creed was strongly modified by Cal- 
vinism. From Geneva and Frankfurt Knox returned to 
Scotland, where, in the foundation of a national church 
with a rigorous Presbyterian constitution, this Calvinistic 
Puritanism soon reached the highest point of development. 
But the Calvinistic spirit of other returning refugees, al- 
though similar to the original Puritan spirit, had no such 
triumph in England. It must first encounter another for- 
eign element in the teachings of the Anabaptists. These 
teachings must have been known in England as early as 
1533 among the educated as well as the lower classes, al- 
though there was at that time no talk of any such English 
sect.^ In 1534 the name Anabaptist appears in English 
documents. In 1535, 1538, and again in 1539 large groups 
of Anabaptists came from Holland. Their doctrines began 
at once to attract attention. In 1541 under Henry VIII 
"an act concerning the King's most gracious, general and 

* Fuller : Church History, II, p. 474. 

^ A. W. Boehme : Reformation der Kirche in England, pp. 151- 
53. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 37 

free pardon " expressly excludes from this pardon the 
heresies and erroneous opinions of the Anabaptists.^ It 
would seem, however, that during the sixteenth century 
there was no decided growth of the sect. The name had 
too recently been associated with the fall of Miinster and 
with events revolting to the sober-minded Englishman. 
Nevertheless the new doctrines became generally known; 
they merged with the important elements of the earlier Eng- 
lish religious movements — the evangelical doctrines of Wy- 
clif and the practical devotion of the early English mystics 
— until Anabaptism in its new environment became the 
spiritual soil from which all non-conformist sects sprang. 
" It was the first plain announcement in modern history of 
a program for a new type of Christian society which the 
modern world, especially in America and England, has been 
slowly realizing — an absolutely free and independent re- 
ligious society, a state in which every man counts as 
a man and has his share in shaping both church and 
state." 2 

In spite of the immediate opposition to Anabaptist 
teachings, the appearance and progress of its ideals within 
the English church is soon apparent. Puritan conventicles, 
the first result of Elizabeth's zeal for conformity, developed 
in time into separatist congregations. Not all Puritans, 
however, left the state church. From petitions to James I 
(1603-1625)3 during the first years of his reign, it is ap- 
parent that the older English Puritans were interested not, 
as were the Scotch, mainly in the fundamental question of 
church constitution, but rather in the right of freedom to 

^ Edmund Gibson : Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, Oxford, 
1761, p. 516. 
^ R. M, Jones : Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 367, 
'Fuller: III, pp. 215-20. 



38 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

preach. A more positive opposition to a state church as 
such came first through the Brownists. 

In Norfolk some Baptists of Holland had found refuge 
from Alba's cruelty. Robert Browne, chaplain of the Duke 
of Norfolk, spent much time with them and in his rest- 
less, passionate nature their ideas found rapid growth. In 
A hook which showeth the Life and Manner of all true 
Christians, 1582, he defines a state church as Antichrist. 
The true church he considers a free community of believers. 
His followers separated from the English church. Though 
Browne himself returned to it later, his early teachings 
spread. In 1594 many Brownists, preferring exile to 
imprisonment, took refuge in Holland. In 1598 they pub- 
lished their Confession of faith of certain English people, 
living in the Low Countries, exiled. In addition to their 
idea of religious freedom might here be noted as important 
to the course of the English reformation their objection 
to prescribed forms of prayer which hinder the work 
of the Spirit ; their insistence upon the life of Christ within 
us as the highest goal attainable; and their rejection of 
preachers " learned only according to the schools " whom 
they regarded as Pharisees and pretenders. Under the 
Brownist leaders Francis Johnson, Henry Ainsworth, and 
John Robinson in England and Holland, the idea of the 
" congregational way " came to full consciousness, that is, 
the idea of the autonomy of each individual congregation, 
the absolute separation of church and state. This idea was 
taken up by non-separatist Puritans, as well as by separatist 
Brownists and Baptists. About 1640 it was nicknamed 
" Independency,*' and Puritans and Separatists alike were 
called Independents. 

Early in the history of Independency a strife arose regard- 
ing the position of elders in the church. This was clearly 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 39 

expressive of the new spirit of religious democracy. Com- 
bined with the common hope of a continuing and immediate 
reformation, this opposition to ecclesiastical aristocracy was 
to form in the near future the strongest kind of a political 
party out of these adherents to the " congregational way." 
The part then played by the Independents in the English 
revolution — how they were recruited from the older, non- 
congregational Puritan party, and even from the Presby- 
terians, while yet engaged in a bitter struggle with both, 
how under Cromwell's leadership they became the power- 
ful advocates of liberty in every realm, how they all but 
turned England into the "fifth monarchy" — these'facts be- 
long to the second or enthusiastic period of Independency. 
With the death of John Robinson, 1625, the old preacher 
who blessed the Pilgrim fathers as they started on their 
way to America, to " clear a path for the kingdom of Christ 
to the remote ends of the earth," the first period of In- 
dependency came to an end. 

From the beginning of the reign of Charles I (1625-1649) 
to Cromwell's protectorate (1653), the form of the church 
constitution was the crucial question. In only one point was 
the Episcopacy, for which Archbishop Laud was striving, dif- 
ferent from Catholicism: all power and authority belonged 
to the crown instead of to the church. Laud did more 
toward founding a new papacy than Henry VIII had done. 
The building up of a kingdom of Christ as a theocracy 
after the Old Testament model was the fundamental thought 
of Presbyterianism. Its demand for a reformation of 
church and state according to the word of God was in 
reality nothing but a demand for rulership by a spiritual 
aristocracy and, in fact, according to " divine right." The 
people in general were much more closely bound to Pres- 
byterianism, by reason of the influence of the Puritans, 



40 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

than they were to Episcopacy. But that austere faith, in 
spite of its strong hold in Scotland, lacked the ideals which 
were to win the hearts of the English people. These ideals 
were furnished by Independency.^ 

That the appearance of the Lord and of His church upon 
this earth was very near at hand had been the general be- 
lief of mysticism throughout the German reformation. 
The Separatists during their banishment were comforted by 
the same chiHastic ideas; they believed that Independency 
was the beginning, or at least the antecedent, of Christ's 
kingdom upon earth. Burroughs and Goodwin, after their 
return to England, became fiery preachers of such beliefs, 
always emphasizing the principle : " not the head but the 
heart makes the Christian." During this period Indepen- 
dency progressed along two lines : its purely religious aspect 
found development in various new sects, and its final conclu- 
sion in the Quakers; its political aspect, of which the first 
form is represented by Levellers ^ and Diggers, evolved the 
principle of individual freedom until it reached the point of 
becoming the impelling force of modern political life. 

The idea of a national church was impossible to the ad- 
herents of the " congregational way." They had no knowl- 
edge of the historical progress and development of the 
church as an institution, and no comprehension of the neces- 
sity or justification of such a growth. They considered 
each separate congregation a law unto itself ; only as an un- 
organized complex of individual congregations could the 
visible church have any relationship to the invisible church 
or spiritual community of all believers. This was partly the 
result of the Calvinistic foundation of the older Puritanism 

* Weingarten, pp. 71-75. 

^ G. P. Gooch : English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Cen- 
tury, Cambridge, 1898. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 41 

upon which the adherents of the '' congregational way " had 
built. According to their practice members of a congrega- 
tion could be only " believers " who could give real evidence 
of their " election " and true regeneration.^ Such a church 
was obliged therefore to oppose all church offices and au- 
thority in order to destroy human authority in the realm of 
faith, so that men might be subject only to God. They had 
no carefully worked out theological dogma in spite of the 
many dogmatic controversies in which they became involved 
and the hundreds of heresies that were attributed to them. 
But the one thought from which their activity and develop- 
ment must be explained stands out ever more clearly — their 
ardent desire to understand and grasp fully religious life in 
its immediacy, in the depth of its whole being a demand 
for inspiration and revelation. 

So far, in the presentation of the early history of the 
epoch of enthusiastic religion, we have spoken directly only 
of the Anabaptist and Brownist sects. Other sects and 
other influences had a part in producing this general 
mystical atmosphere. Since the middle of the sixteenth 
century there had been in England members of the *' Fam- 
ily of Love" or Familists, a sect that had arisen on the 
continent shortly after the Anabaptists, and had its great 
second flourishing period in England during the seven- 
teenth century, through the Commonwealth (1650-1660). 
The sect was founded in Holland about 1540 by Henrick 
Niclaes (1502-c. 1580), a Catholic, who came under the In- 
fluence of David George or Joris, since 1534 an Anabaptist. 
Henry Nicholas, as he is generally called, interpreted the 
whole Bible allegorically, saying that as Moses taught 
hope and Christ faith, it was his mission to teach love. 
About 1550 he visited England. His teachings were 
* Robert Baillie : Letters, II, p. 236. 



42 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

further propagated there by Christopher Vittel, a joiner, 
who appears to have undertaken a missionary journey 
throughout the country about 1560. Fuller ^ states that in 
1578 the " Family of Love began now to grow so numerous, 
factious, and dangerous that the Privy Council thought fit 
to endeavor their suppression/' 

The same year (1578), John Rogers, a bitter but fair- 
minded Protestant, published an account of their doctrines 
in The Displaying of an Horrible Sect of Gross and Wicked 
Heretics naming themselves the Family of Love. They 
were not Separatists, however, but church-goers who held 
private gatherings. Before 1600 they probably attracted 
but few converts, and even until 1620 they must have made 
slow progress. In 1623 Edmund Jessop, after narrowly es- 
caping being converted to Familism, gave an account of their 
doctrines. " They say, that when Adam sinned, then Christ 
was killed, and Anti Christ came to live. They teach that 
the same perfection of holiness which Adam [had?] be- 
fore he fell, is to be attained here in this life; and affirme 
that all their family of love are as perfect and innocent 
as he. And that the resurrection of the dead, spoken 
of by St. Paul in the i. Cor. 15 and this prophesie. Then 
shall be fulfilled the saying which is zvritten, death, where 
is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory? is fulfilled in 
them, and deny all other resurrection of the body to be 
after this life. They will have this blasphemer H. N. 
[Henry Nicholas] to be the sonne of God, Christ, which 
was to come in the end of the world to judge the world; 
and say, that the day of judgment is already come; and 
that H. N. judgeth the world now by his doctrine ; so that 
whosoever doth not obey his Gospel, shall (in time) be 
rooted out of the world; and that his Family of love shall 

* Church History, IV, p. 407. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 43 

inherite and inhabite the earth forever, world without end ; 
only (they say) they shall die in the bodie, as now men 
do, and their soules go to heaven, but their posterities shall 
continue forever. . . . He maketh every one of his 
Family of love to be Christ, yea and God, and himself God 
and Christ in a more excellent manner, saying, that he is 
Godded with God, and codeified with him, and that God 
is hominified with him." ^ 

Even such a prejudiced account does not entirely con- 
ceal the fact that the Familists represented a lofty type of 
mystical religion that insisted upon spiritualizing this world 
rather than dogmatizing about the next. In their insistence 
upon the Divine Light and Life within the Soul and upon 
the unimportance of outward forms and ceremonies, in 
their objection to taking oaths and carrying arms, and in 
their demand for religious toleration, the Familists closely 
resembled the Anabaptists. Although they hold that there 
is but one spirit, the absolute and essential God, in all crea- 
tures in heaven, earth, and hell, and that heaven and hell are 
really within man, they make no attempt to explain evil, or 
to give it, in fact, any recognized place in their system. 
They believe in a perfection to be achieved and maintained 
here and now. The Bible, the facts of the creation and fall 
of man, are of no especial significance to them ; the " light 
within " is the one overwhelming fact. From about 1630 
onward we find controversial literature abounding in 
references to the Familists and their heresies. Familist, 
like Anabaptist, became a general term of reproach. Many 
of the Familist books were reprinted in English. In Pil- 
grim's Progress Bunyan immortalized the allegoric-mys- 
tical journey of H. N. [Henry Nicholas], prophet of the 

^ Edmund Jessop : A Discovery of the Errors of the English Ana- 
baptists, London, 1623, pp. 88-90. 



44 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Family of Love.^ A confutation of their errors appearing 
in 1646^ recognized their relation to the teachings of the 
Theologia Germanica and to the great Neoplatonic 
movement. By confusing the mystical and magical ele- 
ments, a mistake common to that time, the author explains 
the sympathy of the Familists for the alchemists by their 
close relationship to the older mystics, the sympathy 
suggested by the statement : " The Familists are very 
confident that by the knowledge of astrologie and the 
strength of reason, they shall be able to conquer the 
world." ^ The Theologia Germanica was published in 
English by an avowed Familist.* 

Related in thought at least to the Familists were a num- 
ber of mystical teachers belonging apparently, in spite of 
the accusations of their opponents, to no sect whatever. In- 
dependently, and to a great extent unwittingly, they car- 
ried along the mystical, spiritualistic tradition. The most 
important of these individuals was John Everard (c. 1575- 
1645^), Cambridge doctor of theology, exceedingly popu- 
lar preacher, the earliest English disciple of Tauler. After 
his conversion to mysticism he was continually accused of 

^ Ernst Troeltsch : Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen u. Grup- 
pen, p. 402, note. 

^ Benjamin Bourne : The Description and Confutation of Mysticall 
Anti-Christ, the Familists, or an information drawn up and published 
for the Confirmation and Comfort of the Faithfull, against many 
Anti-Christian Fam^ilisticall Doctrines which are frequently preached 
and printed in English; particularly in those dangerous hooks called 
Theologia Germanica, the Bright Star, Divinity and Philosophy dis- 
sected, London, 1646. 

'^ From Chapter I of above. 

* Theologia Germanica. Or Mysticall Divinitie: A Little Golden 
Manuall briefly Discovering the mysteries, sublimity, perfection and 
simplicity of Christianity, in Belief and Practice, London, 1648. 
Preface signed by Giles Randall. 

^ Notes and Queries, 2nd series, VII, p. 457, June 4, 1859. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 45 

Familism and Anabaptism and often imprisoned for hold- 
ing conventicles. He translated the Theologia Germa- 
nica, also writings of Tauler, Dionysius, Hans Denck, and 
became the pioneer of quietistic mysticism in England. 
After his death some of his sermons and translations were 
collected and published in three successive editions, 1653, 
1657, 1659.^ The sermons are edifying and practical rather 
than speculative and metaphysical; their main ideas are in 
the sermon on " suffering and ruling with Christ." Everard 
quotes Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Origenes, Dionysius, St. 
Augustine, St. Bernhard, St. Francis. 

Of a similar spirit was Francis Rous (1579-1659), who 
was made Provost of Eton College in 1644, and a member 
of every Parliament from 1625 until 1656. Until about 

* The Gospel-Treasury Opened; or the Holy est of all Unvailing: 
Discovering yet more the Riches of Grace and Glory; to the Vessels 
of Mercy Unto whom only it is given to know the mysteries of that 
Kingdom and the Excellency of Spirit, Power, Truth above Letter, 
Forms, Shadows. In several Sermons ... by John Everard D. D. 
deceased. The second edition much enlarged. Whereunto is added 
the Mystical Divinity of Dionysius the Areopagite, . . . with collec- 
tions out of other Divine Authors, translated by D. Everard, never 
before printed in England. London. Printed for Ralph Harford, 
1659. Cambridge MS. Dd. XII 68 has John Everard, author of 
Three Books, translated out of their originall: First, the Letter and 
the Life, or the Flesh and the Spirit ; secondly, German Divinitie ; 
thirdly, the Vision of God, written 1638. The first only is included 
in The Gospel-Treasury Opened. It was part of a treatise that 
was later published in London under the title The Mumial Treatise 
of Tenzelius, being a natural account of the Tree of Life and of 
the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a mystical interpreta- 
tion of that great Secret, to wit, the Cabalistical Concordance of 
the Tree of Life and Death, of Christ and Adam. Translated by 
N. Turner, London, 1657. Tenzel's work is founded on Tauler and 
German Divinity (Theologia Germanica). The Vision of God, 
mentioned "thirdly" above, is probably a translation of Tractatus 
de Visione Dei by John Scotus Erigena, a treatise which has never 
been printed. See Notes and Queries, 4th series, I, p. 597. 



46 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

1625 his writings show him as a sound Puritan divine. 
About 1648 he joined the Independents. Long before this, 
however, he had begun the study of mystical writings. His 
Mystical Marriage or experimental Discourses of the 
Heavenly marriage between a Soule and her Saviour, Lon- 
don, 1635 (reprinted 1653), and Heavenly Academie, 

1638 (several times reprinted), show the subjective and 
devotional type of mystic piety. He quotes Thomas a 
Kempis, St. Bernhard, and Dionysius the Areopagite. 

With the interest in the inner life of religion came the 
growing popular demand for religious freedom, a demand 
that found straightforward and determined expression as 
early as 1644 in a pamphlet on Liberty of Conscience — 
" the compelling of a man to do anything against his own 
conscience, especially in matters of faith, is a doing of evil." 
William Dell (1607-1664) and John Saltmarsh (c. 1613- 
1647), chaplains in the army ^ and later friends of Crom- 
well, preached to an attentive, vigorous-minded, and re- 
ligious soldiery the doctrines of the " inner light " and lib- 
erty. They were also very active mystical writers. Salt- 
marsh expresses thoughts so similar to Sebastian Franck's 
that it seems he must have known Franck's writings.^ He 
was of Magdalene College, Cambridge, took orders about 

1639 «^s a zealous advocate of Episcopacy and conformity. 

* " A Survey of the Spiritual Anti-Christ Opening the Secrets of 
Familisme and Antinomianisme in the Anti-Christian doctrine of 
John Saltmarsh, William Dell, the present preachers of the army 
now in England. In which is revealed the rise and spring of An- 
tinomians, Familists, Libertines, Swenck-feldians, Enthysiasts, etc., 
Samuel Rutherford, London, 1647." (A very typical tract). 

^Troeltsch, p. 889, note: "Von Franck's Schriften in England 
wird Herr Sippell berichten, der sie in dortigen Archiven aufge- 
funden, Ein Mann wie Saltmarsh scheint mir ohne Franck un- 
verstandlich ; es sind iiberall verwandte Gedanken, zugleich von 
einer gewinnenden menschlichen Liebenswiirdigkeit." 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 47 

In 1643, however, he resigned his preferment from scruples 
concerning the acceptance of tithes, returning to public 
use all that he had already received, and '' embracing 
with ardor the cause of church reform, reaching by de- 
grees the position of a very sincere^ if eccentric, cham- 
pion of complete religious liberty. This change in his 
views seems to have been produced by his intimacy with 
Sir John Hotham." ^ It is a striking coincidence that 
whereas Sir John Hotham, soldier on the side of the In- 
dependents, is generally considered to have had no particu- 
lar religious feelings or convictions, he was the father of 
Charles and Durant Hotham, of whom we shall hear later 
as mystical teachers, probably the earliest disciples of 
Boehme in Cambridge. Saltmarsh found a sympathetic 
critic, possibly a friend, in John Dury. Two of his books 
deserve a high place among spiritual works : Holy Dis- 
coveries, London, 1640, and Sparkles of Glory or some 
Beams of the Morning Star, London, 1647. 

William Dell's program of church reform was expressed 
in words very similar to Luther's. In reality, he had gone 
beyond Luther in his demands. His whole doctrine of 
salvation is not Lutheran but mystical; the true church 
of Christ on earth can consist only of true believers, of 
those who have evidence from the " inner light " that they 
have been " born again." ^ But Dell made apparently no 
effort to realize his ideals. Like Saltmarsh he joined none 
of the contemporary sects. Later the Quakers put his ideas 
to the test of practical application. 

A mystical contemporary of John Everard's was the Ven- 
erable Augustine Baker (1575-1641), "one of the most 

* Article on Saltmarsh : Dictionary of National Biography. 
^ Theodor Sippell : William Dell's Programm einer lutherischen 
Gemeinschaftsbewegung, Tubingen, 191 1. 



48 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

lucid and orderly of guides to the contemplative life." ^ 
His authorities were the older English mystics, Richard 
Rolle, Hilton, the unknown author of the Cloud of Un- 
knowing (about i350-i40o),2 and the older German mys- 
tics Tauler, Suso, and the Flemish Ruysbroeck. Through 
these writers, as we know, the line of descent goes back 
to the early writers who brought Neoplatonism into the 
church. From Father Baker's MSS. were compiled by 
Father Serenus Cressy devotional books for contemplative 
souls.^ 

A remarkable example of the trend of the time toward 
a deeper religious life is shown in the community at Little 
Gidding. Nicholas Ferrar (1592- 1637), educated in medi- 
cine, traveler, efficient manager of the Virginia Company, 
member of Parliament, left public life in 1624 and retired 
to a small country estate. Little Gidding, whither he was 
promptly followed by the other members of his family. 
This little community of some thirty persons had apparently 
no intention of forming a religious order or sect ; their ob- 
ject was merely to lead a religious life in accordance with 
the principles of the Anglican church. As they said, " They 
had found divers perplexities, distractions and almost utter 
ruin in their callings; if others knew what comfort God 
had ministered unto them since their sequestration they 
might take like course." Naturally such an institution 
caused many comments, and Protestants looked angrily on 
iwhat they considered an attempt to introduce Catholicism. 
But visitors and examiners found nothing to which to ob- 
ject. The community aimed at nothing but the organiza- 

* Evelyn Underbill? Mysticism, p. 559. 

' Edited by Evelyn Underbill, 1912. 

' Appeared as Sancta Sophia. Or Direction for the prayer of 
contemplation, Douay, 1657. Also The Holy Practices of a Devine 
Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions, Paris, 1657. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 49 

tion of a family life on the basis of putting devotion in the 
first place of practical duties. Ferrar was not even de- 
sirous of doing much literary work, but contented himself 
with framing a harmony of the Gospels and of the history 
of the books of Kings and Chronicles. The slight influence 
of the community, which was broken up shortly after the 
death of Ferrar, was toward a deepening of the religious 
life of the time. It had otherwise no connection with the 
mystical forces which we are considering.^ 

Utterly distinct from the various mystical influences 
already discussed, yet springing from the same fountain- 
head and similarly expressive of the general feeling of re- 
ligious unrest and uncertainty was the Cambridge Platonic 
school. Henry More (1614-1687), in whose writings the 
most distinctive traits are best shown, read Proclus and 
Plotinus; Dionysius the Areopagite was one of his dearest 
friends ; he was steeped in the sincere mysticism of the 
Theologia Germanica. His school was purely intellectual 
in character, it sought no followers, it formed no sect; in 
later days it even led men back to the Established Church 
as to a refuge; yet in spite of this, its teachings helped to 
swell the tide of opposition to religion at second-hand, to 
forms and ceremonies, to a clergy skilled only in affairs of 
the intellect and not of the heart and soul. 

We have spoken of John Everard as the pioneer of quiet- 
istic mysticism in England. He was, however, more than 
a mystic in his appeal to thinkers of his time. As the con- 
necting link between mystics and alchemists he represents 
another great seventeenth-century movement. The intel- 
lectual or scientific side of Neoplatonism was represented in 
England quite as well as the mystical side, and seems in fact 

* J. H. Shorthouse has told the story of Ferrar in John Inglesant. 
See Dictionary of National Biography for biographies of Ferrar. 



50 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

to have had an especially popular and widespread vogue 
in the years between 1640 and 1670. The two interests 
are so closely associated ^that there often seems no line of 
demarcation whatever. In Everard's translation of the 
Pymander of Hermes ^ lies the evidence that the quest 
for the philosopher's stone was not in his time entirely 
the material demand that later years have found in it, but 
rather another expression of the ever present quest for the 
spiritual and mystical facts of life. From the time of the 
appearance in England of the writings of Robert Fludd 
(1574-1637) the interest in alchemy had increased enor- 
mously. Fludd was a devoted and outspoken follower of 
Paracelsus, less original perhaps than his master, but more 
methodical, and like him a chemist-physician and prohfic 
writer. His apology for the Rosicrucians ^ seems to have 
been the signal for the appearance in England of a strange 
literature, devotional and quietistic, theosophical and cabal- 
istic, mystical and alchemistic. Typical of the two extremes 
of Neoplatonism are the many translations and reprints 
of The Imitation of Christ^ and the reprints, a little 
later, of Cornelius Agrippa,* and the tracts which have 

* The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistos in 
XVII Books, Translated formerly, out of the Arabick into Greek, 
and thence into Latine, and Dutch, and now out of the original into 
English by that learned Divine Dr. Everard, London, 1650. 

* Apologia Compendiaria Fraternitatem de Rosencruce suspicionis 
. . . maculis aspersum, Leyden, 1616. 

° Thomas a Kempis : The Imitation of Christ, London. H. Den- 
ham. No date. — Another edition, London, 1568; another edition, 
Thomas Rogers, London, 1596. — A book called A title Garden of 
Roses or holy Meditations written first in Latyn by Thomas a 
Kempis, and translated into English by A. H., London. H. Blunden, 
1640. — Edited by John Worthington, 1677. — Under title The Chris- 
tian's Pattern, 1684: The following of Christ, 1685. 

* Three Books of Occult Philosophy . . . by Cornelius Agrippa. 
Translated by J. P., 1650 : The Glory of Women by . . . Agrippa. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 51 

come down to us associated with the name of Hermes. 
Along with many reprints and partial elucidations of earlier 
English alchemists, such as those of Thomas Vaughan 
(1622-1666) and the famous antiquarian Elias Ashmole 
(161 7- 1 692), were published also translations of Para- 
celsus.^ At least two treatises of Valentin Weigel's ap- 
peared in English ^ and there is later mention even of Para- 
celsians and Weigelians ^ as English sects. Henry More, 
like John Everard, was interested in all phases of Neoplaton- 
ism. More proclaimed adherence to the principle of a 
" light within '' as the ultimate test of religious truth ; he 
read Hermes Trismegistos and Marsilius Ficinus * ; his Con- 
jectnra Cabbalistica (1653) ^ gives evidence of his strong 

Translated by Edward Fleetwood, 1652; Agrippa — fourth hook. 
Translated by Robert Turner, 1655. 

^ There are at least six treatises of Paracelsus in the Thomason 
Tracts, published between 1650 and 1657. In Works of Geher, the 
famous Arabian prince and philosopher. Englished by Richard Rus- 
sel. Lover of Chymistry, London, 1678. P. 3 (to reader) : " For 
besides the large volume of the works of Raymund Lully, I have 
Englished the greater part of the works of Paracelsus." 

^ Valentine Weigelius : Astrologia Theologized. Wherein is set 
forth what Astrologia and the light of nature is . . . London, 1649. 
At the end of Life and Death of Mr. John Cotton, London, 1658, 
is a catalogue of some books printed by Lodowick Lloyd contain- 
ing Resignation or Self Denial by Valentine Wigeliiis. 

^Richard Baxter: One Shot against the Quakers, London, 1657, 
pp. 1-13. Also in his Second Sheet for the Ministry, etc., same 
year, p. 12. " The Anabaptists, Socinians, Swenkfeldians, Familists, 
Paracelsians, Weigelians, and such like have no more to show for 
their ministry than we, but their errors, and are so few and so lately 
sprung up, that of them also I may say, that he that taketh them 
for the holy church, or ministers, is either out of the faith, or much 
out of his wits." 

* John Tulloch : Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth 
Century, London, 1872, II, pp. 309-61. 

° Conjectura Cabbalistica, or attempt to interpret the Three first 
Chapters of Genesis in a threefold manner — literal, philosophical 
and mystical or divinely moral, London, 1653. 



52 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

leaning toward spiritual alchemy; and his sympathy with 
Joseph Glanvil in the belief in witchcraft and apparitions 
shows that even these most degenerate resultants of faith in 
the unity of all life were still active agencies even 
among the learned. In its passionate quest for truth 
the seventeenth century did not discriminate. It made no 
distinctions. It drew no line between (i) theosophy, or 
religious and ethical teaching, (2) alchemy, or the relation 
of the material to the spiritual and the transmutation of the 
material into the spiritual, and (3) magic, or the employ- 
ment upon the physical plane of the higher powers latent 
in man. To find a clear-cut division between these three 
elements is always difficult enough, but never -more so 
than in the writings of this period. The beliefs of the time 
were equally confused. As the religious interest increased, 
and with it the confidence in the power of the " inner light," 
the belief in the ability to use this force in the physical 
world increased likewise; on the other hand, the attempts 
to transmute material into spiritual energy could lead men 
only to a deeper belief in that spiritual energy. Religious 
life came nearer and nearer to the enthusiastic stage. In 
the same degree those great progressive, reformatory de- 
sires of the time increased, desires for reforms ecclesiasti- 
cal, educational, and social, ambitions for greater material 
comfort and advancement for the many instead of only for 
the few, — in fact, the whole Rosicrucian, Utopian ideal. 

As a result of this widespread spiritual interest, this de- 
mand for a broader life, this belief in present inspiration 
and revelation, an utter dependence upon the guiding 
power of the '' inner light " became the impelling motive 
of Independency as early as the year 1644. In the power- 
ful emotions of the times, in the stormy excitement of 
civil war, these beliefs called forth a religion of prophecy. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 53 

" Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation 
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking 
her invincible locks : methinks I see her as an eagle renew- 
ing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at 
the full midday beam; purging and unsealing her long- 
abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; 
while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with 
those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at 
what she means, and in their envious gabble would prog- 
nosticate a year of sects and schisms." ^ Thus were the 
times characterized by one who stood in the front rank of 
their enthusiastic supporters. Under these stormy victories 
the Independents grew ever stronger. They began to call 
themselves " The kingdom of Christ's saints " in 1644, and 
were popularly spoken of as " the saints," particularly after 
the triumph of Cromwell's army. Thus their faith enlarged 
to a widespread general feeling of inspiration. 

An enlarging, expanding power, a constructive, spiritual 
energy comes in times of great stress to certain persons, 
making them sure of their alliance with a Being who guar- 
antees the ultimate goodness of the world. The influence 
of unconscious suggestion from social environment is pres- 
ent in this experience and impresses upon it a temporal 
aspect. The actual mystical views of any given period, the 
symbolism through which these inward experiences are ex- 
pressed, the revelations which come to spiritual prophets, 
all bear the mark and color of the age in question. But 
the reformatory power and historical significance of these 
beliefs and revelations are attained, not through the sep- 
arated few as individuals, but through the few as repre- 
sentatives of great groups of people who have the will and 
the power to take a real part in the development of public 

* Milton : Areopagitica. Prose Works, II, p. 94. 



54 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

life. One proof for the general demand of the seventeenth 
century for inspiration lies in Pilgrim's Progress. The 
history of Bunyan's spiritual life is typical of all the 
men of that great period who belonged to the movement 
producing Cromwell's '' Ironsides." Through bitter strug- 
gles of soul these men had come; they must make their 
" calling and election " sure. They had visions and heard 
voices divinely expressive of the great tasks before them in 
a world-historic epoch, which they interpreted as belonging 
to a premillennial time. In all places, and particularly after 
the outbreak of the civil war, there were these apostles of 
freedom and enthusiasm, *' seeing visions and dreaming 
dreams." 

According to the general polemic method of the age every 
differing opinion was considered not only a heresy but also 
as the foundation of a new sect. '' The Independent partie 
grows, but the Anabaptists more, and the Antinomians 
most," ^ writes Baillie. And later, " Most of the Inde- 
pendent partie are fallen off to Anabaptisme, Antinomian- 
isme and Socinianisme ; the rest are cutted among them- 
selves." ^ The home of Anabaptism remained in Holland. 
In 1643 the Anabaptists published their articles of faith and 
began flooding England with pamphlets demanding liberty 
of conscience for all sects. At this time they v/ere merely 
opposed to infant baptism without insisting upon a second or 
adult submission to the ceremony and were but slightly at 
variance with the other sects. The missionaries who came 
over at the beginning of the civil war differed only in name, 
not in practice, from the " saints." Independency repre- 
sented and included all the views which animated the en- 
thusiasts, and, if there were separate meetings for the dif- 

^ Baillie: Letters, II, p. 117. 
^ Baillie : Letters, II, p. 191. 



English Mysticism Before Boehme 55 

ferent so-called sects, this resulted from some personal 
choice and not from a necessity arising from differing be- 
liefs. In spite of the many eccentric forms that the teach- 
ings of Independency take, they all hold the one central idea 
which always accompanies " enthusiasm " : the demand for 
reliance upon the " inner light/' the origin of the religious 
life which knows no earthly history. The general talk of 
the time of a *' chaos of sects " rested upon a misunderstand- 
ing.^ Pagitt mentions fourteen different sects of Anabap- 
tists alone,^ in addition to all the other various sects. But 
he might justly include them all under his " Enthusiasts, 
who pretend that they have the gift of prophecy by dreams 
to which they give much credit." ^ He even speaks of the 
sect of Divorcers founded by *' Mr. Milton, who permits a 
man to put away his wife upon his own pleasure, without 
any fault in her, but for any dislike or disparity in nature." 
Thomas Edwards refers " the errors, heresies, blasphemies to 
sixteen heads or sorts of Sectaries. Yet of that Army, called 
by the Sectaries, Independent, and of that part of it which 
truly is so, I do not think there are fifty pure Independents, 
but higher flown, more seraphicall (as a Chaplain who 
knows well the state of that Army, expressed it) made up 
and compounded of Anabaptisme, Antinomianisme, En- 
thusiasme, Arminianisme, Familisme, all these errors and 
more too sometimes meeting in the same persons ... in 
one word, the great Religion of that sort of men in the 
Army, is liberty of conscience and liberty of preaching." * 
Thus religion in seventeenth-century England reached 
the stage of enthusiasm. Any writings catering to any de- 

* Weingarten, p. 109. 

* Pagitt : Heresiography, p. 35. 

* Pagitt : Heresiography, p. 36. 

* Thomas Edwards : Gangraena, London, 1643, I, p. 13. 



56 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

sire to transcend the ordinary bounds of human life might 
properly expect to find printers and publishers, readers and 
public eager and expectant, and such writings would come 
in answer to the ever-increasing demand. 

In a soil thus receptive to all Neoplatonic thought 
and feeling, the seeds of Boehmenistic teaching might be 
expected to thrive. At the beginning of the great sect-form- 
ing period, the works of Boehme began to appear in Lon- 
don.^ Between 1644 and 1662 his complete works were pub- 
lished in English, sometimes two or more at a time, some- 
times singly. Their spread, moreover, was not confined to 
printed works alone; in England as on the continent they 
passed in MS. from hand to hand. Part of the works ap- 
peared in Latin ; all of them had appeared in Dutch. Often 
the Dutch edition had preceded the German edition; both 
were usually printed in Amsterdam. Occasionally even 
the English edition preceded the German, as in the case of 
the Forty Questions and the Clavis. Most of the 
English translations were made and published by John Spar- 
row (161 5- 1 665), a London advocate who had been an of- 
ficer in Cromwell's army. A relative of Sparrow's, John 
Ellistone, and a printer, Humphrey Blunden, who learned 
German for the purpose, finished the translation. The 
books were sold openly by Blunden and a man named Lodo- 
wick Lloyd in their stores near the London Exchange.^ 

' See Bibliography for complete list of works with dates of pub- 
lication, translation, etc. 
^A. W. Boehme: Reformation der Kirche in England, p. 924. 



Ill 

BOEHME IN ENGLAND 

The interest in Boehme in England after 1644 soon 
became widespread, and extended in many directions. It 
can be traced in the religious, political, scientific, and literary 
life of the time. In the case of the religious interest, the 
relationship was at first hand and acknowledgment was 
frequently made to Boehme's writings. The political sit- 
uation shows some degree of similarity : certain sects in 
which Boehme's teachings were one of the formative in- 
fluences became for a time political rather than religious 
factors. In literature and science, acknowledgment was 
made less openly. To profess an interest in books that were 
read by enthusiasts and sectarians was, to say the least, not 
consistent with dignity. Between poor sectarians and men 
of rank and social importance there was little or no 
friendliness until the time of the hard-won sympathy toward 
a few Quakers, more than ten years after Boehme's writings 
began to be known. 

The first printed mention in England of Jakob Boehme is 
the anonymous " Life " published in 1644 : The Life of 
one Jacob Boehme: who although he were a Very Meane 
man, yet wrote the most Wonderfull deepe Knowledge in 
Naturall and Divine Things that any hath been knowne to 
doe since the Apostles Times; wherein is contained a perfect 
catalogue of his works. London. Printed by L. N. for 
Richard Whitaker. 1644. — The mode of appearance of 
Boehme's works in England followed closely that in Ger- 

57 



58 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

many and Holland, where learned men were the first to 
embrace his teachings and disseminate his writings. These 
writings likewise spread abroad and were widely read in 
manuscript, in England as on the continent. In the 
British Museum is a translation evidently of part of the 
Mysterium Magnum (not published until 1654), a beauti- 
fully written manuscript of 223 folios, dated 1644.^ There 
exists also a beautiful, carefully bound manuscript copy of 
the Way to Christ, dated 1647.^ This was printed in 
1648, a second edition in 1656. This collection of short 
tracts Ritschl considered the most generally popular of 
Boehme's writings. In July, 1853, ^ contributor to Notes 
and Queries,^ asking for information regarding Boehme, 
states that he possesses manuscript copies in English of 
Theosophic Letters, Way to Christ, Concerning the Earthly 
and the Heavenly Mystery, and Of the Supersensual Life. 
Various facts regarding Boehme and the spread of his 
writings in England come out in Sparrow's prefaces. In 
his " To the English Reader," in the Election of Grace, 
or Predestination, Sparrow holds that " the Author Dis- 
putes not at all, he desires only to Confer and Offer his 
understanding and ground of Interpreting the Texts on 
Both sides, ... for the Conjoyning, Uniting and Recon- 

* Harleian MS. 1821 : *' The most remarkable History of Joseph. 
Mystically expounded and interpreted according as it is layd downe 
in ye Holy Scripture : Beginning at ye 36th Chapter of Genesis and 
continuing to ye end of ye booke. Wherein is represented and pour- 
trayed The exact and lively patterne of a True Resigned Christian, 
together with the whole processe of a Regenerate man according 
to the mystery of the new Birth in Christ, both in his Tryall and 
Perseverance and also in his honour and exaltacon. Written by 
Jacob Boehme Teutonicus. Translated out of the German Toungue 
A.D. 1644." 

^ Kindly lent me by Dr. S. P. Sherman, University of Illinois. 

'Notes and Queries, ist series, VHI, p. 13. 



BoEHME IN England 59 

ciling of all Parties in Love." Sparrow emphasizes our 
need of the " inner light " and rejoices " that God hath 
bestowed so great a Gift and Endowment upon this Brother 
of Ours, Jacob Behm." ^ In the preface to the Three 
Principles, Sparrow mentions the benefits that may be 
expected from the study of Boehme's writings. As a 
lawyer, the first thing Sparrow notes and mentions is: 
*' among the rest there is a hint about reforming the laws, 
by degrees, in every nation; and there is no doubt, but if 
those in whose hands it is to make laws, did but consider 
what the Spirit of God is, and may be stirred up in them, 
they would stir him up and make a reformation according to 
that spirit of love, the Holy Ghost. And then they would be 
God's true vicegerants; they would be the fathers of their 
country, and deal with every obstinate rebellious member 
in the kingdom as a father would do with a disobedient 
child. . . . God taketh such care for us all, though we be 
most obstinate enemies against him; and we should do so 
for all our brethren, the sons of Adam ; though they be our 
enemies, we should examine their wants and supply them, 
that necessity may not compel them to be our enemies still, 
and ofifend God, that they may but live. If they will . . . 
turn murderers, let them be provided for as other more 
friendly children of the Commonwealth, and removed to live 
by themselves, in some remote uninhabited country . . . 
with means for an honest subsistence. . . . Then all hearts 
will bless the hands of such reformers and love will cover all 
the ends of the earth." ^ In his preface to his second 
edition of the Forty Questions, 1665, Sparrow tells us: 
"When this book was first printed (1647) I endeavored, 
by a friend, to present one of them to His Majesty King 

* Election of Grace, or Predestination, London, 1655. 

* C J. Barker's edition of Three Principles, XVI, XVII. 



6o Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Charles, that then was, who vouchsafed the perusal of it. 
About a month after was desired to say what he thought 
of the book, who answered, that if the publishers in English 
seemed to say of the author, that he was no scholar, and 
if he were not, he did believe that the Holy Ghost was now 
in men, but if he were a scholar, it was one of the best 
inventions that ever he read. I need not add the censure 
of any other person; knowing none to compare with this, 
one way or other." ^ 

Sparrow's first translations were Forty Questions and 
the Clavis, published in 1647. The year before a pub- 
lic discourse on Boehme had been held by Charles 
Hotham " in the publicke Schooles of the University of 
Cambridge at the Commencement, March 3, 1646." Charles 
Hotham (1615-c. 1672) was one of the earliest of Boehme's 
learned admirers. He received his degree at Cambridge, 
was appointed fellow of Peterhouse^ 1644, university 
preacher and proctor, 1646. He was regarded as a man 
of very great eminence in learning and strictness in 
religion and conduct. In his younger days he studied 
astrology and afterwards had a love for chemistry and 
was a searcher into the secrets of nature. In 1667 he 
became a member of the Royal Society. The discourse on 
Boehme, Ad Philosophiam Teutonicam Manductio, was 
published in 1648 by Humphrey Blunden. It was dedicated 
to the chancellor, senate, and students of Cambridge, and 
contained some verses by Henry More, commending the 
author but professing ignorance regarding Boehme due to 
the difficult language and style of his writings. In 1650 
the pamphlet appeared in an English translation by Charles's 
brother Durant Hotham.^ 

' C J. Barker's edition of Forty Questions, XVI, XVII. 

' An Introduction to the Teutonick Philosophie. Being a de- 



BoEHME IN England 6i 

In his " Epistle Dedicatory '' to the pamphlet, Charles 
Hotham shows that he is reading Boehme the philosopher 
and scientist rather than Boehme the mystic or religious 
reformer : " Whatsoever the Thrice-great Hermes deliver'd 
as Oracles from his Propheticall Tripos, or Pythagoras 
spake by authority, or Socrates debated, or Aristotle 
affirmed, yea, whatever divine Plato prophesied, or Plo- 
tinus proved; this, and all this, or a far higher and pro- 
founder Philosophy is (I think) contained in the Teu- 
tonicks writings." He seemed also to believe ^ that an 
abiding interest in Boehme had been started in Cambridge : 
" I doubt not but the height of what I have promised will 
be abundantly performed by the Authors Book of the Three 
Principles, which as I am informed, is now at schoole, and 
will in a few months be taught in our language." 

Durant Hotham's note " from the translator to the 
Author " probably represents the feeling of many of his 
contemporaries : " Translations are things very difficult, 
especially when the notion is uncouth. Yet hath this been 
my chief e inducement to adventure upon this assay; my 
aim being to make the notion familiar, by transplanting 
into our native soile ... in truth it is very hard to write 
good English and few have attained to its height in this 
last frie of Books, but Mr. Milton. As to the matter and 
author of the Teutonick Philosophy, which you here ab- 
breviate; though you know I alwaies affected it and him, 
yet durst never saile into the ocean of his vast conceits with 
my little skull, me thought the reading of him was like the 

termination concerning the Original of the Soul: viz, Whether it 
be immediately created by God, and infus'd into the Body ; or trans- 
mitted from the Parent. By C Hotham, one of the Fellows of 
Peter-House. . . . Englished by D. F. London. Printed by T. M. 
and A. C. for Nath. Brooks, 1650. 
* End of Dedicatory Epistle. 



62 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

standing upon a precipice or by a cannon shott off, the 
waft of them lickt up all my brains. I confess your intro- 
ductio hath made me something more steady and his notions 
more familiar and I have found some inkling of them in 
scripture, so have shaken hands with less suspicion. . . . 
In my opinion whoever reads this scheme of the world's 
creation, and birth of the soul may make excellent use of it, 
receiving his noble descent from these eternal essences, and 
shame to bemire himself in that swinelike refreshment and 
wallowing in cold dirty mire." 

Durant Hotham became a justice of the peace. For 
many years he lived in Yorkshire, engaged in scientific 
pursuits. In 1654 he published a life of Boehme for which 
Humphrey Blunden furnished him the material. We shall 
find him later in friendly agreement with George Fox and 
his teachings. 

This interest in Boehme as a scientist and natural philoso- 
pher comes out also in one of Sparrow's prefaces. He 
writes '' To the Earnest Lovers of Wisdome : ^ Learned men, 
Selden, Sir Francis Bacon, Comenius, Pellius, Du Chartes 
. . . these, and some others in their kind have gone as 
farre, as the naturall facultie of man's outward reason can 
reach; this author Jacob Behmen esteemeth not only his 
owne outward reason, but acknowledgeth to have received 
a higher gift from God, freely bestowed upon him, and 
left it in writing, for the good of those that should live 
after him. ... In his writings he hath discovered such a 
Ground and such Principles, as doe reach into the deepest 
mysteries of Nature, and lead to the attaining of the highest 
powerful naturall wisdome, such as was amongst the ancient 
philosophers, Hermes Trismegistos, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, 
Plato, and other deep men, conversant in the operative 

* Forty Questions, 1647. 



BoEHME IN England 63 

mysteries of nature; and the moderne Trevisanus, Ray- 
mundus, Lullius, Paracelsus, Sendivogius and others ; by 
which men will be satisfied, that not only they have gotten, 
but that wee also may get that Lapis Philosophorum the 
Philosopher's stone indeed. ... By the study of these 
writings, men may come to know . . . how all the reall 
differences of opinions, of all sorts, may be reconciled ; even 
the nicest differences of the most learned Criticks in all 
ages : that which seemeth different in the writings of the 
profound magicall mysticall chimick Philosophers, from 
that which we find in the experimentall Physicians, Astron- 
omers, Astrologers and Mathematicians may be reconciled 
by considering what this author teacheth." 

Neither Sparrow nor the Hothams were sectarians. Spar- 
row ^ resorted to mysticism as a refuge from the sectarian 
religions of his time; Charles and Durant Hotham were 
orthodox churchmen. The spread in England of Neopla- 
tonic ideas was not at all confined to the confessedly re- 
ligious sects. The fundamental thoughts of Independency, 
the origin and development of which are sketched in the 
preceding chapter, were closely related to those of the free 
societies or academies of the seventeenth century. In fact 
so nearly identical are the ideals of the sects and of the 
free societies that at times it is exceedingly difficult to dis- 
tinguish between the two forms of organization. They 

^ There is evidence to show that Hartlib was acquainted with 
Sparrow. May 19, 1659, Hartlib wrote to Boyle : " This day parlia- 
ment past an act for constituting John Sadler, John Sparrow and 
Samuel Moyer judges for probate of wills." (Works of Boyle, Vol. 
VI, p. 126.) The Dictionary of National Biography states that in 
1659 "John Sadler, Taylor, Whitelock and others were appointed 
judges for probate of wills" (article on Sadler). Hartlib knew 
Sadler; full of detail and news as his letters are, it is doubtful if 
he would mention facts about mere names that held no interest for 
himself or the recipient of his news. 



64 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

wrought toward the same end. " Humanism on the one 
hand and Anabaptism on the other have contributed," says 
Troeltsch/ " in the realms of ethics and human rights, 
more than the older Protestantism to the formation of the 
modern world." 

The word " humanism " took its origin in antiquity and 
meant then the purely human, or the ideal humanity to which 
mankind might be educated. When in the church of the 
Middle Ages the depravity of human nature since Adam 
became the dominant teaching, the belief in this humanistic 
ideal became officially impossible. Yet we have seen how 
the belief lived on and how it was fostered by continued 
organized activity which leads from the teachings of Ploti- 
nus by way of the Neoplatonic academies, by way of the 
mystics and heretics, to the brotherhoods and academies of 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

In England in 1645 ^^ academy, the " invisible college " 
or Academia Londoniensis was founded by Theodor Haak, 
a German who studied in Oxford and Cambridge in 1625, 
and returned to England in 1629 after a few years spent 
on the continent. Haak was a public-spirited man, zealous 
for the progress of all learning, a friend of Comenius. 
There is evidence also of other " free societies " in England 
about this time.^ It was the society founded by Haak, how- 
ever, that at the time of the Restoration (1660) was char- 
tered by Charles II as the " Royal Society." 

Under Cromwell's protection the members of the London 
Academy were not obliged to conceal their purpose abso- 
lutely. Nevertheless a great deal of obscurity still surrounds 
the " invisible college," or " collegium philosophicum," as it 

^ " Bedeutung des Protestantismus f iir die Entstehung der Mo- 
dernen Welt." Quoted, M. C. G., XV, p. 265. 
'M. C. G., XVI, p. 244. 



BoEHME IN England 65 

was also called. Many of the members are known to us 
as personal friends of Milton. Samuel Hartlib, who came 
to London in 1628, was surely known to Milton as early 
as 1644. In the correspondence between Hartlib and 
Robert Boyle Milton's name is mentioned several times. 
Through Boyle's nephew Richard Jones, Earl of Ranelagh — 
one of Milton's pupils — the poet's acquaintance with Hein- 
rich Oldenburg of Bremen took on a deeper personal in- 
terest. Oldenburg was also father-in-law of John Dury, 
likewise a member of the " invisible college," a friend of 
Milton, and also one of Hartlib's early friends. 

The ideals and plans of the *' college " and its close rela- 
tion to similar societies on the continent — a relation shown 
by the recurring mention of the names of continental leaders 
— are well outlined in Hartlib's correspondence, which was 
carried on not only with all the countries of Europe, but 
with the West Indies and the North American English 
colonies, and dealt with religion, politics, science, literature, 
schools and universities, useful inventions and social im- 
provements. These ideas are also brought out in Hartlib's 
various activities ; he was " the zealous solicitor of Christian 
peace amongst all nations, the constant friend of distressed 
strangers, the true-hearted lover of our native country, the 
sedulous advancer of ingenius acts and profitable sciences," * 
a man whose activity in spreading knowledge and whose 
zeal in doing good bore fruit in mitigating the severe pres- 
sure of seventeenth-century conditions. It would be im- 
possible to enumerate his various attempts for the mental, 
moral, and material advancement of society by publication 

* Dedication to Hartlib in Beale's Herefordshire Orchards a Pat- 
tern for all England, London, 1657. Quoted, Worthington's Diary, 
I, p.- iv. 



66 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

and correspondence, by the establishment of institutions, 
by philanthropic enterprise, public and private. 

Whether Hartlib came to England originally as an agent 
for John Dury in the interest of a union of all Protestant 
churches is not quite certain.^ Assuredly he was deeply 
interested in the project from 1630 on, when Dury came 
to London. From Dury's " Platform of the Journeys that 
must be undertaken for the work of Peace Ecclesiastical 
and other profitable ends," ^ we can see how far-reaching 
and inclusive the plans of Hartlib and Dury were. The 
Platform discusses first the main project of gaining every- 
where influential persons to help in the advancement of 
" Peace in the Churches." It then discusses the minor con- 
sideration '' as tyme and leisure shall permit to gather and 
observe severall things of great profitt." The minor con- 
siderations of the platform follow : 

"Things to be gathered: i. All rare Bookes. 2. All Inventions 
and Feats of Practice in all Sciences. — For bookes I will not only 
cataloguize them, to know their* Titles and contents in what Lan- 
guage soever they bee, but also will seeke out how and where they 
may bee purchased and chiefly, I will lay hold of MS. that we may 
have either the Autographon or the copy of them. For Inventions 
and Industries, I will seeke for such chiefly as may advance learn- 
ing and good manners in the Universities, Schools and Common- 
weales ; next for such as may bee profitable to the health of the 
body, to the Preservation and Encrease of wealth by trades and 
mechanical Industries, either by Sea or Land; either in Peace or 
Warre. 

" Things to be observed : 

" I. The proceedings and Intentions of the Reformators whom 
this latter time hath brought forth in Germany ; that we may [know] 
the things wherein they are thought to excell former ages and other 
societies which are these: 

(i) Some Extraordinary meanes to perfeit the knowledge and 
unvail the mysteryes of the Propheticall scriptures. 

^Althaus: Samuel Hartlib, pp. 197-202. 
"" B. M. Sloane MS. 654, ff . 247-49. 



BoEHME IN England 6^ 

(2) Meanes to perfeit the knowledge of the Orientall tongues 
and to gaine abilities fitt to deale with the Jewes, whose calling is 
supposed to be neere at hand. 

(3) Arts and Sciences, Philosophicall, Chymicall and Mechanicall; 
whereby not only the Secrets of Disciplines are harmonically and 
compendiously delivered, but also the Secrets of Nature are thought 
to he unfolded. . . . 

(4) A magical Language whereby secrets may be delivered and 
preserved to such as are made acquaint with it traditionally. . . . 

" 2. The State of the Churches in Germany : to know all the Sects, 
Divisions and Subdivisions of them that profess Christ in those 
places with their particular and different Opinions, and the Circum- 
stances, Occasions, Causes and Effects of the Controversies, as for 
example of the Socinians, Anabaptists, Swenkfeldians, Familists, 
Weigelians, Nagelians and to purchase the chiefe bookes of all their 
Tenents, and to observe the differences of their Churches, orders 
and customs serving either for Decence or Discipline." 

Boehme and the Behmenists were not known in England 
until several years after this document was written. If 
Dury carried out his plan of learning about German sects, 
he must, in his many years spent in Germany and Holland, 
have come across the Behmenists just as well as he came 
across the Weigelians and the Familists. Judging by the 
fragments that we have of his voluminous correspondence 
we come to the conclusion that he immediately communi- 
cated his knowledge of the Behmenists to Hartlib, his faith- 
ful friend and co-worker. 

Hartlib's interest in a union of churches does not lead 
us to expect in him an ardent partisan of any special 
creed. With the other men of his class he was decidedly 
opposed to the " riot of sectaries " in England. Neverthe- 
less, he had friends among the Puritans; that he was in 
sympathy with the Independents in their demand for tolera- 
tion is shown by one of his publications.^ Among his 

^ A short Letter modestly entreating a friend's judgment upon 
Mr. Edwards his Booke he calleth an Anti- Apologia; with a large 



68 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

friends abroad there were outspoken Separatists. So 
early as 1650 he corresponded with the Hebrew scholar, 
Adam Boreel of Amsterdam/ who had denied the authority 
of church and creed and had joined the Dutch sect of Col- 
legiants. The CoUegiants, however, believed in the " inner 
light." In spite of strict adherence to the orthodox 
faith, Dury shared this belief. In a book published by 
Hartlib, Dury insists that " the sufficient qualification of 
ministers is the gift of God's Spirit in them," ^ and that " the 
nearer prospect [of understanding the mysteries of Scrip- 
ture] is the inward testimonie of Jesus who is, to all that 
believe in him, the immediate wisdom and the power of 
God." ^ The spirit of Andreae's reformation and Christian 
college or society is the spirit of Dury's Seasonable Dis- 
course, briefly " shewing i. What the grounds and methods 
of our Reformation ought to be in Religion and Learning, 
2. How even in these times of distraction the worke may be 

but modest answer thereto. London, 1644. The " short Letter " 
signed Sam. Hartlib, is addressed to Hezekiah Woodward, a Puri- 
tan, whom Hartlib had known since 1628; Woodward's answer is 
directed against Edwards, and argues for toleration. 

^B. M. Sloane MS. 649, f. 40, copy of letter from Hartlib to 
Boreel, Feb. 8, 1650. Boreel is often mentioned in Hartlib's corre- 
spondence with Worthington and with Boyle. 

^ A Seasonable Discourse. Written by Mr. John Dury upon the 
earnest request of many. Published by Samuel Hartlib, London, 
1649, p. 5. 

^ Clavis Apocalyptica; or, the Revelation Revealed. In which the 
great Mysteries in the Revelation of St. John and the Prophet 
Daniel are opened ; It being made apparent that the Prophetical 
numbers come to an end with the Year of our Lord 1655. Written 
by a German DD and for the rareness of the Subject, and benefit 
of the English nation translated out of High Dutch. The second 
edition, much enlarged and many things explained for the capacitie 
of the weaker sort. London. 1651. Dedicated to Oliver St. John 
by Samuel Hartlib, An Epistolical Discourse from Mr. John Durie 
... by waie of Preface, p. 24. 



BoEHME IN England 69 

advanced, By the knowledge of Oriental tongues and Jew- 
ish mysteries, By an Agency for the advancement of Uni- 
versal Learning." ^ Before 1636 Dury wrote that he was 
exceedingly pleased by the Dextra amoris.^ He also 
wrote Andreae, asking his assistance in the plan of ecclesi- 
astical union. ^ 

The correspondence between Hartlib and Comenius had 
important results ; not only did Hartlib publish many of 
Comenius's writings on educational reform, but he also 
induced Parliament in 1641 to extend to Comenius an in- 
vitation to visit England. The outbreak of the civil war 
(1649) prevented these two men from carrying out their 
plans for a general school reform. Comenius, during his 
six months' stay in London, wrote Via lucis, in the 
eighteenth chapter of which he suggested, as a helpful 
method for spreading light (knowledge) among all peoples, 
the founding of a higher and uniform organization which 
should unite all of the existing societies in the various 
countries under a new name; he suggested also that the 
English brotherhood should be placed at the head of the 
undertaking. ** All the colleges, societies, and fraternities," 

^ From Seasonable Discourse, title page. See note 2, p. 68. 

^ B. M. Sloane MS. 417. Excerpta Literarum de Rebus Eccle- 
siasticis et Eruditione anni 1638. Johannis Duraei. (In Hartlib's 
writing.) f. 3b. "Die Dextra Amoris [Andreae's Christiani amoris 
dextra porrecta, 1620] gefallet mir iiber alle Massen wol, undt 
scheinet der Author derselben ein man summae pietatis and solidis- 
simi judicii zu sein. Es were nur zu wiinschen, dasselbige ihren 
effect erreichete, oder noch erreichen mochte, so wiirde gewiss nicht 
so viel Gottlosigkeit und unchristliches wesen inter ipsos creditos 
Christianos gefunden werden. Sed non ita bene agitur cum rebus 
humanis, ut meliora pluribus placeant. Sonst habe ich zufor von 
dergleichen Collegio niemals gehoret, viel weniger von einem fiirsten 
der solches furhaben hatte befordern wollen." [Undated. Next 
heading, f. 21, dated 10 Nov., 1636.] 

^ B. M. Sloane 654, f . 24b. Dated Sept., 1633. 



70 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

said he, " which have formerly secretly and openly existed, 
have been of some assistance, it is true, for theology and 
philosophy, but only for a part of mankind, not the v^hole/' ^ 
He wished to call the organization *' Collegium lucis " and 
its members " ministri lucis." It was to be founded on the 
three sources of knowledge, the book of nature, the Scrip- 
tures, and the inborn ideas or inner light ; these three sources 
he called the teachings of Pansophia. After the general 
reformation of Christendom was effected, the work should 
be extended to include the Mohammedans, heathen, and 
Jews. The pamphlet De rerum humanariim emandatione 
consultatio catholica ad genus humanum ante alios ad em- 
ditos Eiiropae, written by Comenius, 1645, was to further 
this plan for union and progress. Hartlib proceeded to gain 
the interest of influential men in various places — the Via 
lucis was sent in manuscript to the Swedish Chancellor 
Oxenstierna and to others — with the intention of finally 
making public the results. Hartlib thus indicated that 
secrecy in these societies was not an end in itself but only 
at times an undesirable means and necessity. 

There is evidence of the direct influence of Boehme's 
writings on the theology of Comenius,^ in whom the 
broader humanistic tendencies and mystical religious feeling 
were closely united. The similar way in which Boehme and 
Comenius treat nature and inspiration (or inner wisdom) — 
Sophia in Boehme, Pansophia in Comenius — is at once evi- 
dent. It is hardly possible that these two men had any 
personal acquaintance, although Comenius was born in Bo- 
hemia and Boehme near the Bohemian frontier ; Comenius 
was only a few years old when Boehme started on his Wan- 
der jahre, the unrecorded period of his life. The Bohemian 

'M. C. G.,IY, pp. 155-57. 
^ Encyc. Brit.: Comenius. 



BoEHME IN England 71 

brotherhood — a form of free society of voluntary member- 
ship very similar to the academies — of which Comenius was 
the twentieth and last bishop, conserved (just as the Wal- 
denses had done) the old-Christian tradition and belief. 

Since the publication of More's Utopia, 15 16, ideas 
of state or world reform, more or less distinctly traceable 
to Plato's Republic, had flourished among almost all 
European nations. In 1551 appeared Franciscus Patri- 
cius's La Citta Felice. After the Fama F rater nitatis, 
1614 (circulating in manuscript by 1610), came Andreae's 
Reipiiblicae Christiana politanae descriptio, 1619, Campa- 
nella's ^ Civitas solis, 1623, and Bacon's Nova Atlantis, 
1629. In 1641 Hartlib published his ideal of a state in " A 
brief description of the famous Kingdom of Macaria, shew- 
ing its excellent government, wherein the inhabitants live 
in great prosperity, health and happiness; the king obeyed, 
the nobles honoured and all good men respected; vice 
punished and virtue rewarded. An example to other na- 
tions. In a dialogue between a scholar and a traveller. 
Dedicated to ' The High Court of Parliament.' " 

It seems evident that the humanistic idea of world reform 
was part of the propaganda of English free societies. Just 
how much they owed to the sister societies on the continent 
or perhaps even to Andreae, it is difficult to determine. 
John Dury, the close friend of Haak and Hartlib, knew 
some of Andreae's writings, as we have seen. Boyle in a 
letter to Hartlib, March, 1647,^ says : " Your Imago Socie- 
tatis and your Dextera Amoris I have great longings to 
peruse." In the next letter, April, 1647,^ he writes : " Your 
Imago Societatis with a great deal of delight I have perused, 

* Campanella was a member of Accademia Delia in Padua. 

* Birch : Life of Boyle, p. 74. 

* Birch, p. 75. 



*J2 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

but must beg some leisure to acquaint you with my opinion 
of it, which now were almost impossible for me to do, I 
having already presented it to a person of quality with 
whom if it take suitably to my wishes, it may thence have 
no obscure influence upon the public good. . . . Campa- 
nella's Civitas Solis and that same Republica Christiano- 
politana . . . will both of them deserve to be taught in our 
language." Beale, another member of the " invisible col- 
lege," writes : " I do extremely indulge the design of begin- 
ning the Building of Christian societies in small models. 
. . . 'Tis strange to me, that the model of Christian so- 
ciety and that curious offer of the right hand of Christian 
love hath taken no deeper footing in England." ^ The 
Dextra amoris, Right hand of Christian love, and Republica 
Christianopolitana we recognize as Andreae*s; the Imago 
Societatis opens a new question. 

In the correspondence of Hartlib with Boyle ^ and with 
Worthington ^ the terms " Utopia," '' macaria," " antilia," 
" nova Atlantis " seem to be used as symbols or names for 
academies or their plans. Boyle says to Hartlib, May, 
1647,* " You interest yourself so much in the invisible col- 
lege, and that whole society is so highly concerned in all 
the accidents of your life, that you can send me no intelli- 
gence of your affairs that does not assume the nature of 
Utopian." The " Utopian correspondence " refers to the 
activities of the secret societies, but to more than the " in- 
visible college." Hartlib was concerned in a plan for the 
establishment of another society, more extensive and more 

* Worthington's Diary, I, p. 156. Quoted in Hartlib's letter, July, 

1659. 

^ In Life by Birch, also in Boyle's Works, V. 

" Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, ed. by J. 
Crossby, 1847. 

* Birch, p. 78. 



BoEHME IN England 73 

ambitious. This society, referred to sometimes as " Mar- 
caria/' sometimes as ** Antilia," was '' to unite the great, the 
wealthy, the religious, and the philosophical and to form a 
common center for assisting and promoting all undertakings 
in the support of which mankind were interested. Every 
invention conducing to public benefit, every valuable work 
of literature, every defense of Christianity and endeavor to 
promote unity among Christians, every charitable founda- 
tion lacking assistance, were to be encouraged, refreshed, 
and upheld from this universal fountain." ^ This plan, to 
Hartlib's bitter disappointment, finally came to naught, and 
*' the smoke of it was over." Something of its nature and 
history may be seen in Hartlib's correspondence with Boyle 
and Worthington, more perhaps in his — as yet unnoted — 
correspondence with Poleman, which is headed in Hartlib's 
handwriting " Antilia or German Society. Imago Socie- 
tatis. Ex lit[teris] Polem[an]. Amst." ^ 

Joachim Poleman was a physician of Amsterdam, de- 
votedly attached to Hartlib; if we judge from the number 
of letters written during a few months — these letters are 
preserved among Hartlib's papers — Poleman was appar- 
ently a very constant correspondent. In May, 1659, 
Hartlib mentions to Boyle the receipt from Holland 
of a book on medicine " Novum Lumen Chemicum, sive 
Medicum Polmanni . . . opening the mystery of the sul- 
phura philosopher (J. B. van Helmont). My son hath 
read it, and commends it as a most excellent piece for 
the advancement and amendment of all medical knowledge ; 
he counts also the whole treatise most worthy to be trans- 

* Worthington's Diary, I, p. 163, note. 

' B. M. Sloane MS. 648, ff. 10-15. Copies by two hands, partly 
Hartlib's. 



74 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

lated." ^ Nov., 1659, Hartlib entreats Boyle " to favour 
Mr. Poleman with your directions [for a certain medi- 
cine] ... I cannot have a more faithful, careful and 
otherwise more knowing man, than Mr. Poleman, who, I 
am confident, doth love me as his own soul." ^ 

Poleman's letters speak of a certain German society the 
development of which was prevented by the war, and of 
another (which he himself had expected to join) that was 
broken up by the death of many members.^ " What do you 
think," he asks, " of the delineation of such a society under 
the title Dextra amoris Christiano porrecta or Imago Socie- 
tatis ? " * Hartlib's zeal for the public welfare seems to 
Poleman worthy of great praise. He rejoices in the an- 
nouncement of Hartlib's new secret society and is pleased 
beyond measure that his own plans were so exactly like those 
of the new society, to which he suggests that he send some 
of his experienced and reliable friends as helpers. The 
earth, as a result of the proper training of youth, is indeed 
to become a paradise through a Christian reformation in all 
ranks and classes; the necessary means (Geldmittel) the 
society will be able to raise. But how, he inquires 
anxiously, will the members avoid the suspicion of being 
mere goldmakers? What pretext will they use to conceal 
their lofty gift of transmutation? They may well expect 
trouble and persecution. He asks Hartlib to send him a 
copy of the plans of the society in full, also a description 
of its religious ceremonies.^ Poleman then asks whether he 

* Boyle's Works, V, p. 288. 
^ Boyle's Works, V, p. 296. 
' Sloane 648, f. 11. 

* " Was aber M. H. [Mein Herr or Magister Hartlib] gedenckt 
von einer . . . deliniation solcher societat unter dem Titulo Dextra 
amoris Christiano porrecta wie auch Imago Societatis." 

° Compare Hartlib to Boyle, Nov., 1659, in Boyle's Works, V, 



BoEHME IN England 75 

may tell his best friend Comenius about it. Although he 
says he is signally unworthy of the honor, he gladly accepts 
the invitation to join this Antilia.^ 

It seems that the Utopian Antilia-Macaria believed that 
it had the mission to transform the world through proper 
education of all children from their earliest years and 
that it also possessed the power to make the gold with which 
to pave the way for a speedy transformation of that kind. 
This society appears to be quite distinct from the one 
planned by Hartlib and Comenius, but a close relation may 
easily have existed. At any rate, it failed utterly in accom- 
plishing its design. Hartlib died in 1661, and in the 

p. 293 ..." Macaria, whose scope it is most professedly to propa- 
gate religion and to endeavor the reform of the whole world." 

^ Sloane 648, f. 12. October 3, 1659. " Auf sein mir sehr ange- 
nehmes schreiben vom 9 Sept. fange ich billich meine andtwort an 
auf M. H. froliche botschaft einer solchen societat die da so es die 
Noth des gemeinen besten erforderte, gnugsame goldmittel machen 
konne, zur ehre Gottes u. erbauung des boni publici . . . Oct. 10 
. . . Kan nicht gnug sagen wie hoch der H. mich erfreuet hat mit 
der confirmation wegen der Societat, u. das dieselbe in kurzten 
tagen sal herfiir thun werde. Aber alles eher erfrewet mich 
dieses am meisten, dass mein intent mit der societat intention sogar 
eigentlich iibereinkomen. Der M. H, wird vor 8 tagen verstanden 
haben welch ein herzliches Verlangen ich habe die jugendt in einer 
rechten ordnung der auferziehung u. information zu bringen, auf 
dass aus ihnen als aus dem guten saamen hernach tiichige recht 
geistliche godselige u. godgelehrte manner u. reipublic werden kon- 
nen . . . Ich mochte auch wohl gern vom H. verstandiget werden, 
wie sie ohne suspicion de possessione tinctura Philos. dieses ihr 
Vorhaben werden konnen [an] stellig machen, massen ich hierin 
etliche difficultates besehe, doch werden sie als weisse leute solchen 
difficultat wohl vorzukommen wissen . . . f. 13. ob sie dem P. 
anvertrauen werden, durch welche mittle sie solchs vornehmen zu 
ende werden bringen konnen : oder was f iir pretext u. deckel sie 
gebrauchen wollen, ihre hohe gabe der transmutation zu bedecken 
u, zu manteln . . . Oct. 17, 1659. Aber der H. sey dieser meiner 
wenigen worte eingedenck, es wirdt ohne grosse Verfolgung u. 
triibsaal nicht abgehen." 



*j6 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

meantime part of the '' invisible college " had become the 
Royal Society, with certain circumscribed interests, mainly 
scientific. The career that Hartlib and the other brothers 
had worked for, the academy's organized power for social 
reform, had ended. 

And Boehme's relation to this? The gold-making plans 
of the Antilians were not the schemes of greedy alchemists 
nor the projects of irresponsible promoters, but the result 
of an insistent belief that to the pure in heart and the truly 
charitable the greatest gifts come from a loving God. The 
secrets of the universal medicine and of the metal-trans- 
muting tincture would be revealed to that man who learned 
to know God aright.^ *' The smattering I have of the Phil- 
osopher's Stone (which is something more than the perfect 
exaltation of gold)," says Sir Thomas Browne, ** hath taught 
me a great deal of divinity, and instructed my belief how that 
immortal spirit and incorruptible substance of my soul may 
lie obscure, and sleep awhile within this house of flesh." ^ 
This " incorruptible substance " is man's " goldness," a per- 
fect principle revealed by the Christ within (" inner light ") 
— a principle which can be perfected through education. 
The Antilians, like the spiritual alchemists, were interested 
most of all in producing the spiritual tincture or philos- 
opher's stone, the mystic seed of transcendental life which 
should transmute the imperfect self into spiritual gold. For 
this purpose, Poleman, in Novum Lumen Chemicum, a 
book he sent to Hartlib,^ recommended the reading of 

^ Compare Hartlib to Boyle, Nov., 1659, in Boyle's Works, V, p. 
296: "... it will certainly yield both the universal medicine and 
the tincture: if it should fail, I am assured from others, that Ma- 
caria is a real possessor of both these great blessings, but will own 
neither of them professedly." 

^ Religio Medici, pt i. 

^See above, p. yz- 



BoEHME IN England *jj 

Boehme. This book was published in English, probably at 
Hartlib's instigation.^ There is an extract in Hartlib's writ- 
ing from a letter of Poleman's about Boehme.^ In his 
earlier letters Poleman had stated that several of Boehme's 
works were being printed at Amsterdam by " Beeth " [per- 
haps Betkius]. He mentioned this to show why he had been 
unable to find a printer for the Via veterum sapientum 
by Frankenberg, a friend of Hartlib and Poleman.^ 

The study of Boehme and the study of nature on the one 
hand, and the practice of medicine and of alchemy, spiritual 
and practical alike, on the other, were closely related 
in the seventeenth century. A student of Paracelsus was 
more than likely a student of Boehme as well. One 

^ Novum lumen medicum, wherein the excellent and most neces- 
sary Doctrine of the highly-gifted Philosopher Helmont concerning 
the Great Mystery of the Philosopher's Sulphur is fundamentally 
cleared. By Joachim Poleman. Out of a faithful and good-intent 
to those that are ignorant and straying from the truth, as also out 
of compassion to the sick. London, 1662. In his preface Pole- 
man mentions Paracelsus and Basilius Valentinus in addition to 
Helmont. On pp. 113, 116, 160, 204 he discusses Boehme and rec- 
ommends him to the seeker after Truth. 

"" B. M. Sloane 648, f. 10. " Ich kann alhier nicht vorbey M H 
[Magister Hartlib] im vtrauen [vertrauen] zu vermelden, daz ich 
einmal der Persohn welche gedachte Heimniss [alchemistische 
Geheimmisse] weis, etliche Paragros [Paragraphos] aus Jacob 
Bohmens Schriften vom Philosopishen opere furgelesen, welches 
als er etwas von mir lesen horete (sintemahl er zwar niemahlen 
etwas im Bohmen gelesen) hat sich derselbe mir entsetzet u. ver- 
wundert sagende. — Ist's moglich daz dieser man solches im geist 
erkand hat. Er hat die warhaftige warheid geschrieben, den ich 
solches alles mit meinen sichtlichen augen gesehen habe. Von 
dieser Persohn auch hoffe ich durch G [Gott] solches Kleinod zu 
erlangen zu welcher Persohn mich G so wunderlich gefuhret hat, 
daz es iiberall mein Verstandt u. Vernunft gehet u. bitte solches H. 
Clodio [Herrn Frid. Clodius, Hartlib's son-in-law, a physician] zu 
berichten u. durch ihn der Societat zu vermelden." 

'B. M. Sloane 648, f. 10. 



78 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

of the translators of Paracelsus says in his apology to the 
reader : " I am not so intent to make my own excuse as to 
leave thee altogether without a caution: what therefore 
that most profound Teutonic philosopher Jacob Behmen, 
somewhere in his writings saith to his reader, that I counsell 
thee, viz. if thy mind be not spirituall forbear to read these 
things, for they will doe thee more hurt than good." ^ An 
alchemist or, rather, a " chymist " — the term was first em- 
ployed about the middle of the century — was sometimes 
even called a '' Teutonicus,'* the general name for Boehme.^ 
Further evidence of the connection between Boehme 
and the English alchemists is adduced by various Eng- 
lish works that were recommended for the elucidation of 
the Teutonic philosopher's writings. Among these were ^ 
Magic a Adamica * and Lumen de Lumine ^ written by 
Thomas Vaughan (1622-1666) who called himself Eugenius 
Philalethes. Vaughan was an admirer of Agrippa and 
Paracelsus, a great " chymist " and experimental philos- 
opher, a Neoplatonist with scientific rather than mystical 
tendencies. He wrote the preface to the first English trans- 
lation of the Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio, 1652, 
but he roundly contradicted the charge of being a " zealous 
brother of the Rosie-Crucian fraternity." ® Vaughan was 

* Philosophy Reformed and Improved . . . Oswald Crollius and 
. . . Paracelsus . . . translated by H. Pinell. London. 1657. 
Translator's apology, p. 2. 

^ Worihington's Diary, I, p. 195. " Some whisper the King should 
be a Teutonicus and lover of Chymistry." Letter from Hartlib, 
June, 1660. 

* According to A. W. Boehme, p. 923. 

* Magica Adamica or the Antiquity of Magic and the Descent 
thereof from Adam downward, proved, etc. London, 1650. 

" Lumen de Lumine or a new Magical Light discovered and com- 
municated to the world. London, 1651. Dedicated to Oxford Uni- 
versity. 

* A. E. Waite : Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan, p. viii. 



BoEHME IN England 79 

neither a papist nor a sectarian, but a true resolute church- 
man.^ At the time of the plague (1665) he accompanied 
Sir Robert Murrey to Oxford. Robert Murrey was the first 
president of the Royal Society before the charter was ob- 
tained,2 and, according to Aubrey, " a good chymist who as- 
sisted his Majestie in his chymicall operations." ^ 

Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), the great seventeenth-cen- 
tury antiquary and publisher of alchemistic treatises, left 
among his papers a copy of Boehme's one strictly alche- 
mistic epistle, headed : *' Copied [probably by] Dr. Joseph 
Webbe. Translation of a Dutch letter on the work of 
tinctures, by Jacob Bohmen an alchemist." * In the same 
collection of papers, among the " miscellaneous remains of 
Theodoricus Gravius, medical, theological and epistola- 
tory," 5 there is a rather long discussion of Boehme's doc- 
trine. T. Gravius was rector at Linford, 1641. Among 
Ashmole's books were copies of several of Boehme's works. 
Even in the library of a person as temperamentally opposed 
to mysticism of any kind as Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) 
were some of Boehme's works. The catalogue entries in 
his own hand of the Forty Questions and the Three Prin- 
ciples are still to be seen.® 

On the side of philosophical and scientific influence 
Boehme's most noted follower was Isaac Newton (1642- 
1727). William Law (1687- 1762), the great eighteenth- 

^Wood: Athenae Oxonienses, III, pp. 722-25. 

^ Sir William Huggins: The Royal Society (Spells Murrey 
"Moray"). 

^ Aubrey : Brief Lives, Oxford, 1898, II, p. 82. 

* Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS. 1499, f. 279. It is a copy of 
Epistle ZZ of the English edition, addressed to Christianus Steen- 
berger, Doctor of Physic. 

' Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS. 1399, ff. 88-93. 

® Pepysian Collection 1130, in Magdalene College, Cambridge. 
Pepys had the two volumes bound together. 



8o Milton and Jakob Boehme 

century disciple of Boehme, states in a letter to Dr. 
Cheyne : ^ '' When Sir Isaac Newton died, there were found 
amongst his papers large abstracts out of J. Behmen's 
works, written with his own hand. ... It is evidently plain 
that all that Sir I. has said of the universality, nature and 
effects of attraction, of the three first laws of nature, was 
not only said, but proved in its true and deepest ground, by 
J. B. in his Three first Properties of Eternal Nature. . . . 
Sir Isaac was formerly so deep in J. B. that he, together 
with one Dr. Newton, his relation, set up furnaces, and for 
several months were at work in quest of the Tincture, 
purely from what they conceived from him. . . . Sir Isaac 
did but reduce to a mathematical form the central principles 
of nature revealed in Behmen." Sir David Brewster, in 
his biography of Newton, does not deny that Newton was 
interested in alchemy, although he tries to make light of this 
interest and especially of Boehme's influence.^ Brewster 
seems to overlook the fact that an interest in alchemy and 
philosophy at that time meant an interest in science and 
scientific research — the foundation of all modern science. 
There is evidence that the founder of the so-called modern 
scientific method, Francis Bacon, as well as most of the early 
members of the Royal Society, were believers in alchemy 
and astrology. Among the NeWton papers there are many 
MSS. on alchemy — transcripts from a great variety of 
authors, named and unnamed. There is no reason for re- 
jecting Law's testimony that some are abstracts from 
Boehme's works.^ 

* Memorial of Law, p. 46. 

^ Sir David Brewster: Life of Sir Isaac Newton, London, 1875, 
p. 271. 

^According to Notes and Queries, 8th series, VIII, p. 247, "the 
papers of Newton relating to Boehme are in Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge." I could not find them there. According to the Catalogue 



BoEHME IN England 8i 

Law also discusses the general scientific influence of 
Boehme. The same observations which apply to Newton 
will apply generally, he says, to most of the " philosophical 
schemes and discoveries of more recent date; among the 
minor ones, for instance, to the science of physiognomy in- 
troduced by Lavater and perfected as phrenology by Drs. 
Gall and Spurzheim; also to that which is sound in the 
philosophy of Berkeley [1695-1753], to the delicate and 
well-grounded, though difficult science of homeopathy of 
Hahnemann, who studied the principles of J. B. (as more 
particularly described in his Signatura Rerum) . . . All 
these individuals were students of Behmen, and many others 
of the savans of Germany and England both dead and 
living." 1 

The affinity between Boehme and the students of alchemy, 
as a result of the great revival of interest in alchemy, was 
exceedingly close ; important, too, was Boehme's general re- 
lation to the academies and their teachings. Although he 
may not even have known of the existence of the academies, 
he must in a certain sense be considered the developer and 
systematizer of their beliefs. He laid the philosophical 
foundation for what they were already attempting to put 
into practice. Parts of his first work, the Aurora and the 
Three Principles, were written in 1612; after that he 
wrote no more until 1618. In the meantime the Rosi- 
crucian movement started. As representatives of the 
humanistic spirit, the true Rosicrucians were not distin- 

of the Portsmouth Collection of books and papers written by or be- 
longing to Sir Isaac Newton, Cambridge, 1888, some of Newton's 
papers (notably those on mathematics) were given to the Uni- 
versity Library, Cambridge. Those on theology, chronology, his- 
tory, and alchemy were returned to Lord Portsmouth at Hurst- 
bourne. 

^ Memorial of Law, p. 3. 



82 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

guishable from the members of the acadamies. Expres- 
sive of this movement v^as the great spread of ideas of 
world reform, of methods of getting at the secrets of nature, 
of advance in the sciences of medicine and alchemy. Such 
ideas filled the minds of people of all classes. By expound- 
ing the true nature of man, Boehme laid a foundation for 
social reform ; the body of his writings is an exposition of the 
inner workings of nature; and in the Four Complexions 
as well as in other works there are explanations, far in ad- 
vance of the general knowledge of his time, of the tempera- 
mental origin of disease. His decided preference for the 
one great church invisible, as opposed to the '' churches 
of stone " with their unenlightened clergy, is a theoretical 
expression of Dury's practical attempts to form a union of 
all Protestant churches. Every one of Boehme's books is 
a protest against the dry scholastic method of teaching ; like 
Comenius he depends on three sources of knowledge — na- 
ture, the Bible, and inspiration. Under his doctrines of 
free-will and freedom of conscience, he would extend the 
possibility of salvation to Mohammedans, Heathens, and 
Jews. Boehme's attitude toward the pretended alchemist 
was that of contempt, exactly the attitude of the man who 
really was filled with the spirit of Andreae's teachings, 
toward the man who boasted himself a Rosicrucian. The 
spirit of restless longing and dissatisfaction of the early 
seventeenth century, a spirit that found expression in the 
plans for world reform and in the Rosicrucian dreams of 
fraternity, was also mirrored in Jakob Boehme's writings. 
Mystical Christianity, a search for the hidden secrets of na- 
ture, a belief in man as the microcosm, in harmony with 
God — these thoughts found in one group of writings would 
lead inevitably to an interest in the other group. 

Closely related, from early Reformation times, to the at- 



BoEHME IN England 83 

tempts of mysticism and magic to solve the problems of 
spiritual progress was the effort to find the key to the 
apocalyptic prophecies. Cromwell's Ironsides and the 
" Saints " believed that they were ushering in the millen- 
nium. Books and tracts set the exact date for this turn in 
the affairs of men. Interest in alchemy seems especially to 
have been accompanied by this interest in prophecy. Hart- 
lib represents the interests of most of the men of his group 
in his Chymical Addresses,^ also in his publication of the 
anonymous Clavis Apocalyptica.- His correspondence with 
Joseph Mede, Milton's Cambridge tutor, is full of reference 
to Biblical prophecy fulfilled and to be fulfilled.^ A number 
of Hartlib's letters to Worthington show an interest in 
Boehme's ideas. Nov. 20, 1655, he writes : " The book 
which I received, when once you were at my house, written 
by one Felgenhauer under the name of Postillion, is now 
extant in English with a catalogue of all Books of this 
Author, that are printed and not printed." * 

Paul Felgenhauer was a devout student of Boehme. His 
works read like free paraphrases of his master, in which, 
it must be confessed, he has done little to make clearer the 
statements of the Teutonic philosopher. The catalogue of 
the English translations that Hartlib mentions shows that 

^ Chymical, Medicinal, and Chynirgical Addresses: Made to 
Samuel Hartlib Esquire. London, 1655. About medicines, surgical 
measures, the philosopher's stone, etc. 

^ See above note 3, p. 68. 

'Joseph Mede also wrote a Clavis Apocolyptica, not to be con- 
fused with the publication by Hartlib of a work of the same title. 
See Works of Joseph Mede, London, 1672. 

* Postilion or a New Almanacke and Astrological prophetical 
Prognostication. Calculated for the whole world, and all Creatures, 
and what the Issue or Event will be of the English Warres, etc. . . . 
Written in High Dutch by Paulus Felghenore, and now translated 
into English in the year 1655. London, 1655. 



84 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

a number of the works have either the same titles or ones 
very similar to some of Boehme's works, for instance, Au- 
rora Sapientiae, published in 1628, and Mysterium Magnum 
or the Great Mystery of Christ and His Church, published 
in 165 1. These works were also circulated in England in 
MS.,^ sometimes under the pseudonym Angelus Marianus. 
Felgenhauer's works were sometimes confused with those 
of Boehme.2 

Another writer who combined the interest in alchemy 
and apocalyptic prophecy was Abraham von Frankenberg 
(1593-1652). This Silesian nobleman, dissatisfied with 
the letter-service of the clergy and its helplessness in better- 
ing the condition of mankind, eagerly accepted the teachings 
of Tauler and a Kempis, then of Schwenkfeld and Weigel, 
and finally those of Jakob Boehme. Frankenberg became, 
in fact, a personal friend of the shoemaker-philosopher, and 
to him one of Boehme's Epistles is addressed. The Life of 
Boehme in the Amsterdam edition of his works was written 
by Frankenberg. He is generally regarded as one of 
Boehme's best-known friends and admirers.^ He wrote 
also under the name of Amadeus von Friedleben. His 
treatises on practical mysticism, the life of man ruled by 
the " inner word," are frankly alchemistic in tone ; he quotes 
Paracelsus and the scientific Neoplatonists as freely as he 

* British Museum, Sloane MS. 1304 is a translation apparently of 
four of his shorter treatises. Sloane MS. 728 is The book of 
Jehi, which was published in 1640. A MS. note on the front page 
says : " this manuscript I take to be parte of Ja. Boehmen workes 
translated." The Bodleian has Ashmole MS. 417, IV: Aurora 
Sapientiae. 

^ Universal Lexicon aller Wissenschaften u. KUnste. Halle und 
Leipzig, 1733, Article, " Boehme." 

^ Colberg: Hermetisches Christentum, p. 326 — J. A. Calo: de 
Vita Jacobi Boehmii. Wittenberg, 1707. Caput IV. Both of these 
books give a Hst of Frankenberg's works. 



BoEHME IN England 85 

does the mystics. His Raphael ^ is a treatise on spiritual 
alchemy, infused with the spirit and teachings of Boehme. 
In his Via veteriim sapientum ^ he quotes from Andreae's 
Menippits, Mythologia Christiana. 

As early as 1646 Frankenberg^ had been a friend of 

* Published Amsterdam, 1676, by Betkius. 
^ Published Amsterdam, 1675, by Betkius. See p. 86. 
■ Sloane MS. 648, flf. 89-90. 

(Letter from Abraham von Frankenberg to Samuel Hartlib. In 
Lain.) 

Health and Happiness ! 

This year which now hastens on I was writing to Thee, most 
excellent man, through thy kinsman George, with some small suit- 
able literary gifts, but as I hear that that offering yielded to rapine 
at Dunkirk the matter must be entered into a second time. Behold, 
therefore, my most favourable Hartlib, some mystic pledge of our 
dear friendship, the EYE and KEY : by which things I desire to 
open fully to thee, most desirable of friends, the thoughts of my 
mind. Simplicity and straightforwardness are the witnesses of love 
and uprightness, and thus we come to the inner house. Truly there 
have been present other consolations of our inclinations and af- 
fections, but the means of presenting these before the public are 
lacking. And this my left EYE, by many not sufficiently admitted 
of the right, perchance seems to be in darkness to those who, al- 
though themselves overspread by a cataract, put forward more 
obscure rather than clearer matters. Of the KEY, whatever Theo- 
logians are about to think it matters not. This I know that the 
eyes and the ears of the common herd cannot discern or tolerate 
the light and the word of wisdom and the truth of hidden things. 
And since one teaches that wisdom is by far the most central and 
universal thing, it is not wonderful that the lowly and plebeian 
should not understand or grasp such things because they neglect 
them and are ignorant. Therefore let him understand who can, 
let him carp who will, it is all the same to me. For I know in what 
I believed and by what I wrote. To the good all things are well, 
and even in good is some evil ; to the evil nothing is good, even 
the best. However, I strive neither for myself nor mine by these 
things, although I seek food or clothing, I have it not during my 
six year exile. And now I am a wandering star and a lounger, that 
is I live from another's table. Verily I had thought to gain some- 
thing of a provision for my people by little writings of this kind, 



86 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Hartlib. He contributed to Hartlib's collection of papers 
on educational reform.^ In 1655 Hartlib tried to find a 
publisher in England for Frankenberg's cuius Sydereus, 

or rather to conciliate my patrons ; but Fate and Desire go not on 
equal foot! 

Yet some there were, although poor, who esteemed these things 
good, among whom Dn. Comenius and Dn. Hevelius not at all the 
least. 

" He makes his living by robbery who has mind without light, 
but if he is happy in his patron he lives by his genius." 

Thou, most dear man, will accept these things rightly and will 
not deem me unworthy of thy favour and patronage (if perchance 
the occasion occur). For if my divine EYE, to use the Latin idiom, 
should give light to any one at all, it will be freely allowed to him 
by me in any way in which the thoughts of the mind find expression. 
Wherefore, I have especially destined for thee a copy, one out of 
Three, properly corrected with margins added. Do with it what- 
ever seems good and pleasing for the use of the Christian state. 
Moreover I am giving birth to another production, the mystic name 
of which I had assigned before I was in this country, but I do not 
yet know to whom I may commit the care of producing the same 
before the public or how it will be done, since I suspect evil. The 
pamphlet five with the fourfold and geometrical figures will not be 
unwelcome or useless to thee and, by thee, to those similarly cultured 
in universal knowledge. 

My " little kindred sons '* which remain are : — 

(i) Eusebius' wisdom or " Viam veterum sapientum." 

(2) Saphir's " Elem. de Numerorum " as far as the twelfth way 
in mysteries. 

(3) Raphael, " De Fundamento Medicinae Kabal. Mag. Chym." 
If any others come to me they shall sleep in my chamber. If 

monitors come to keep watch they shall prove themselves; nor shall 
they be molested since they are equipped and content to dwell with 
the poor. 

Meanwhile in whatever way thou canst help me to use these do 
assist me, particularly if they offer and show any mystical and occult 
secret wisdom of God, Nature and of Art. In the meantime I am 
cherishing inwardly, besides various other things, certain miscel- 
laneous thoughts concerning the return of the spirit to God; re- 



' British Museum, Sloane MS. 648, if. 91, 92. Also Sloane MS. 649, 
ff. 104- 1 12. 



BoEHME IN England 87 

but was unsuccessful because the treatise was in Latin.^ 
Poleman, Hartlib's friend in Amsterdam, was apparently 
commissioned with the publication of the Via veterum sa- 

embodying transmigration of souls, and metamorphosis or the sepa- 
ration, illumination and perfection of body, soul and spirit, in one 
word, deification or participation in and communion with the Divine 
Nature. Concerning this I have brought together and discerned 
between various authorities, both ancient and late, sacred and pro- 
fane (lest I should seem, out of my own brain, to be arrogant and 
foolish), and I am toiling to lead back to behind the threshold. 
What other things are in full play thou wilt see from the annexed 
Ichnograph. I received also lately from Upsala an Ich. of Thomas 
Agrivaillens, of Burius Aquilonaria, certain old Northern oracular 
runes, among which are : — 

(i) Adulruna Therasica, concerning the mysteries of the 
Scripture. 

(2) Adulruna Rediviva, concerning the mysteries of the 
Alphabet of three crowns. This thoroughly arranged, 
I sent, ex Burii Autographo, to Rome to Athanasius 
Kircher. 

(3) Tabula Smaragdina [the Smaragdine Table attributed 
to Hermes] of the chronology of the Cherubim. 

(4) Table of Hebrew Philosophy. 

(5) Speciminis Linguae Scanfianae Tabula. [Table of a 
specimen of Scandinavian language.] 

(6) Ariel Sueticus, or Mystical chronology. 

(7) Runa Redux ad ol. Worm. 

(8) Twelve songs of Suetica Puta: — 

Of the creation of the world. 
Of his own novitiate. 
Of the inner man. 
Of the complaint of the spirit. 
Of the sloth of the soul. 
Of the condition of the present time. 
Of the least in the kingdom of Heaven. 
Of remotest time. 
Of the fruits of the inner man. 
Of the way to the tree of life, etc. 
And I await from the same : — 



^ Worthing ton's Diary, I, p. 64. Hartlib to Worthington, Dec. 12, 
1655. 



88 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

pientum; in 1660 he wrote Hartlib that Betkius was so en- 
gaged with Boehme's works that he could not print Frank- 
enberg's piece.^ However, Betkius did print this work at a 
later date. 

It has been suggested that Frankenberg was the author of 
the Clavis Apocalyptic a, published by Hartlib and Dury. 
An extract of a letter to Hartlib states : " The Jesuits have 
learnt who is the author of Clavis Apocalyptica which 
you have translated and printed in English, and the Em- 
peror hath set 4,000 Rix dollars upon his head." [Dated 
Lesna in Poland, 3 July, 1654].^ It is true that Franken- 
berg was exiled on account of his teachings and that he took 
refuge in 1645 (in Danzig) with the astronomer Helvetius, 
whom he helped in mathematics. He died, however, in 1652, 

(9) Famam e Scanfia Reducem. 
(10) Ariel or the key of the Bible, etc. 
Also Dn. Benedictus Figulus, who, with Dn. Comenius and Dn. 
D. Cyprianus Kinnerus this last 21 August was absent from Stock- 
holm. 

1 desire Henry Reginald's MargAe|^mv [? 'Ae^iav = speech] ; Berel- 
lium's De Rebus Mysticis; M. J. Gaffarel's Codicum Caballisticum, 
Advis sur les Langues or De necessitate LL. Oriental, also his 
Abdita Divinae Kabala Hysteria; Hovardeus De arte Arcana [of 
secret art] and any others of this sort. 
Farewell most learned philosopher Hartlib, and be kindly towards 

thy most affectionate 
Gedani, 25 Aug. Abraham de Frankenburg (who desires 

[i. e. Dantzic] thy answer by Dn. Comenius or 

Ao. 1646. kinsman George). 

Dn. Hevelius's I send also a copy De Fontibus 

Silonographa * salutis prope Halberstadium 

nundinis vernalibus [Concerning the fountains of health 

will see light in France. near Halberstadium], miracles by 

simple faith. (All magnetic). 

* Hevelius's Selenosraphie, published in 1647. 

' British Museum, Sloane MS. 648, f. 10. 
''British Museum, Additional MS. 4156, f. 103. 



BoEHME IN England 89 

the year after the book was published. His connection with 
Helvetius suggests at once that he was well known in the 
group of Hartlib's progressive friends; certainly he was 
well known to Dury and Comenius. He was also a friend 
of Menasseh Ben Israel who came to England during Crom- 
well's Protectorate to promote the readmission of Jews into 
England. Menasseh's circle of Christian friends was large 
and distinguished. Of special interest to us perhaps are 
Frankenberg, to whom Menasseh sent a copy of his portrait 
in 1643/ P^ul Felgenhauer, the ardent Boehme disciple, Mil- 
ton, Dury, and Hartlib, whose " excellent Treatise The Rev- 
elation Revealed " [referring to the Clavis Apocalyptica] 
Menasseh commends in his Hope of Israel, published in 
London, 1652,^ as " the most harmonious and clear of any 
discourse of that nature." We should remember at this 
point that Hartlib and Dury and the members of the " col- 
lege invisible " in general were in favor of a religious 
toleration that included Jews — one of Boehme's great 
teachings. 

A friend of Hartlib who figured largely in the Hartlib- 
Worthington correspondence and who was " most familiarly 
acquainted these many years with Mr. Dury," ^ was the 
learned Adam Boreel of Amsterdam. Boreel was one of the 
leaders of the Dutch Collegiants,* a sect corresponding to 
the English Seekers. It is worthy of note that Hartlib, who 
seems to have made no friends among the sectarians of 
England, had friends among the well-known leaders of sects 

> * Mennasseh Ben Israel's Mission to Oliver Cromwell. Lucien 
Wolf, London, 1901. Notes, pp. 149, 169. 

^ Quoted in above, p. 53. 

' Worthingtons Diary, I, p. 290, Hartlib to Worthington, June 
II, 1661. There are letters from Boreel to Hartlib in B. M. Sloane 
MS. 649. 

* Hylkema : Reformateurs, Haarlem, 1902, pp. 150, ZZ3- 



90 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

abroad. Boreel was also a follower of Jakob Boehme.^ 
Blunt 2 even speaks of a Dutch sect of Boreelists started 
by Adam Boreel in the latter half of the seventeenth century, 
a sect of austere life and habits of worship, like the English 
Quakers rejecting all external ordinances of Divine worship. 

The greatest possible contrast to Adam Boreel was pre- 
sented by another follower of Boehme — Gifftheyl,^ a fanat- 
ical German who lived for some time in England and who 
seems to have been, to some extent at least, a protege of 
Hartlib. He first became known in England in Two Letters 
to the King. By Gifftheyl. Published March, 1643. To 
Worthington, Hartlib writes of Gifftheyl as the author of an 
enclosed printed sheet — " one Gifthill who has travelled and 
written these thirty years after this manner/' * To another 
correspondent'' Hartlib writes the story of Gifftheyl, who, 
in his opposition to the army and all authority and in his 
predictions of the approach of Christ's kingdom, seems an 
uneducated enthusiast carried to heights of fanaticism. 

Much of our early information regarding the spread of 
Boehme's doctrines in England comes to us from his op- 
ponents. They note as a matter of course Boehme's attrac- 
tion for the alchemists.® In 1655, Meric Casaubon in his 

* J. W. Rumpaeus : De Jacoho Bohmio, Susati, 1714, p. 8, and 
Adolf von Harless: /. B. und die Alchymisten. Leipzig, 1882. 
Vorrede. 

'^ J. H. Blunt : Dictionary of sects, heresies, ecclesiastical parties 
and schools of religious thought, London, 1874. Article, " Boreelists." 

" Murdock's translation of Mosheim's Church History, Boston, 
1892, IV, p. 391. 

* Worthing ton's Diary, I, p. 163. Jan. 30, 1659. 
" British Museum, Sloane MS. 648, f. 47. 

* The Practice of Christian Perfection. By Thomas White, Lon- 
don, 1652. Dedicatory Epistle . . . '' Except you have holinesse, you 
will be subject to run out to the wild and ungodly studies of Jacob 
Boehme, Astrology, etc." 



BoEHME IN England 91 

Treatise concerning Enthusiasm discussed the ** Teu- 
tonic Chimericall extravagancies of Religion " and men- 
tioned in a note, page 126, " Wigelius, Stifelius, Jac. 
Behmius; and divers others of that countrie, mere Fanat- 
icks ; as unto any sober man may appear by their writings : 
some of which have been translated into English." The 
year following, Dr. Henry More (1614-1687), the head of 
the Cambridge Platonists, whose interest in the whole 
mystical, Neoplatonic movement dates back to his reading 
of the Theologia Germanica, criticised Boehme rather un- 
favorably in his Enthiisiasmus Triumphattis. In 1670 he 
published the Philosophiae Teutonicae censiira, devoted en- 
tirely to a discussion of Boehme. He condemns the latter 
for his claim of inspiration, but speaks highly of him as a 
sincere man who intended no fraud. In fact, he said so 
much in favor of Boehme that the whole criticism, according 
to Carriere, had the opposite effect from the intended warn- 
ing against Boehme; it acted, in fact, as a favorable 
judgment on the part of an unprejudiced theologian. The 
growth of the interest in Boehme's writings between 1655 
when he is mentioned in a note and 1670 when a learned man 
devotes to him a whole treatise is remarkable, especially in 
view of More's statement that Boehme has very many ad- 
mirers,^ and just as many persons who consider him a dia- 
bolical heretic. More calls Boehme the apostle of the 
Quakers.^ 

* Opera Omnia, I, p. 531 : " Sed hoc est quod dico me nempe mani- 
festo mei ipsum obnoxium reperire censurae duarum et diametro 
oppositarum hominum partium, quippe alteri Autorem. Quern ex- 
aminandum auscepi, tanti aestimant, ut nihil infra Canonizationem 
et Infallibilitatem, juxta hos enormes illius Admiratores, Meritorum 
ejus magnitutinem sequare possit. Alteri e contra eum adeo ex- 
ecrantur tanquam Hereticum Diabolicum." 

* Opera Omnia, p. 532. 



92 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

It is said that More's interest in Boehme was due to the 
influence of Lady Anne Conway/ his '' heroine pupil," at 
whose desire More wrote on Boehme. It may be that his 
real interest in the Teutonic philosopher, of whom he had 
known as early as 1646 through his friend Charles Hotham, 
dates back to the time of the Conjectura Cabbalistica (1653), 
of which Lady Conway was also the inspiration. A 
lover of the cabalistic doctrines could hardly fail to be at- 
tracted to Boehme. Certain it is that More's criticism in 
1656 (in his Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, p. 294), is already 
of the very kindly tenor of the Censura appearing fourteen 
years later. Although More considers the poor shoemaker 
a holy and good man, he will not admit that his writings 
must proceed '' from an infallible spirit." In the Divine 
Dialogues {2nd ed. 1667, pp. 460-70), More discourses again 
at some length on Boehme's doctrines and closes by affirming 
that there is but little danger in the Boehmist sect, since " at 
present, by a kind of oblique stroke, God does notable exe- 
cution upon the dead formality and carnality of Christendom 
by these zealous Evangelists of an internal Saviour." 

Lady Conway's interest in Neoplatonism was well-known 
— '* her perusing of both Plato and Plotinus, her searching 
into and judiciously sifting the abstrusest writers of The- 
osophy." ^ Finally, in spite of the opposition of More, her 
learned tutor and friend, she became a professed Quaker. 
She had attended meetings of the Quakers with her phy- 
sician, Mercurius van Helmont, who lived long in her family. 
Van Helmont was the son of Jean Baptiste van Helmont, the 
alchemist and follower of Paracelsus. If we judge from his 

^ Richard Ward : The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr. Henry 
More, London, 1710. Edited by M. F. Howard, London, 191 1, p. 
206. 

* Ward, p. 205. 



BoEHME IN England 93 

character as sketched by More in the Divine Dialogues he 
seems to have been " skillful but eccentric and superstitious 
in his profession, and pious in a mystical way more akin to 
Behmenism than to the Quakers." ^ Lady Conway em- 
bodied her own beliefs on the principles of philosophy in a 
dissertation which was published some time after her 
death.2 gj^^ makes no direct mention of Boehme, but many 
of her theories are thoroughly Boehmenistic in tone; the 
whole work is Neoplatonic with a special leaning to the 
Kabalah. 

Beginning with the letter of January 8, 1668, the corre- 
spondence between Hartlib's friend Worthington and Henry 
More has frequent references to Boehme. " I believe you 
had your ears full of Behmenism at Ragly (Lady Conway's 
home)," writes Worthington; " for when I was at London, 
I met with one who was to buy all Jacob Behmen's works, 
to send thither. I wish (thought I) that nobody trouble 
their heads more than needs about finding what is not to 
be had there, but is in other books to better purpose, and 
without such trouble." ^ Later letters presuppose an ex- 
cellent knowledge of Boehme's doctrines on the part of 
both writers and show their common opinion of the 
great good amid the " stubble, wood and hay " of his im- 
perfect style. Worthington in fact cared enough about 
these writings to speak particularly of them in his will; to 
his aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Foxcrof t, he left " what pieces " 
he had of Boehme's.* 

* Ward, p. 17. 

* Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae de Deo 
Christo, Amsterdam, 1690. Translated into English : The principles 
of the most ancient and modern philosophers. Made English by 
J. C, London, 1692. 

' Worthington's Diary, II, pt. ii, p. 287 ff. 

* Worthington's Diary, II, pt. ii, p. 370. 



94 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

This influence which we have been tracing and which we 
have found molding the thoughts of the intellectual leaders 
of this period — learned men of various types — was at work 
more generally in the hearts of the common people. We 
have spoken of the rise of various English sects under the 
impulse of the nurseries of freedom in Holland which sent 
to England a persistent stream of mystical opinion and 
literature. This stream was the source of the animating 
ideas of Anabaptists, Familists, Seekers, Quakers, and many 
other sects insisting upon relinquishing lifeless ceremonies 
the inner meaning of which had long been forgotten. The 
earliest mention of a distinct sect that followed Boehme's 
teachings falls in 1655. 

It is from Richard Baxter (161 5-1 691), the great Puritan 
opponent of all sects whatever, that we get the most in- 
formation concerning the Boehmenists. *' In these times 
(especially since the Rump reigned)," he tells us,^ " sprang 
up five sects at least, whose Doctrines were almost the same, 
but they fell into several shapes and names: i. The Vanists; 
2. The Seekers; 3. The Ranters; 4. The Quakers; 5. The 
Behmenists." The fifth group forms the sect ''whose 
Opinions go much toward the way of the former [Quakers], 
for the Sufficiency of the Light of Nature, the Salvation 
of Heathen as well as Christians, and a dependence on 
Revelation, etc. But they are fewer in number, and seem 
to have attained to greater Meekness and conquest of 
Passions than any of the rest. Their doctrine is to be seen 
in Jacob Behmen's Books, by him that hath nothing else 
to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand 
him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to 

* Reliqu-iae Baxterianae, or Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the 
most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times, I, p. 74, § 119; 
I, p. 77, § 124. 



BoEHME IN England 95 

know that his bombasted words do signifie nothing more 
than before was easily known by common terms. The 
chiefest of these in England are Dr. Pordage and his 
Family, who live together in community, and pretend to 
hold visible and sensible communion with angels." In a 
later discussion of the Nonconformists Baxter states : " The 
fourth sort are the Independents . . . who have opened the 
door to Anabaptists first, and then to all the other Sects. 
These Sects are numerous, some tolerable and some in- 
tolerable, and being never incorporated with the rest, are 
not to be reckoned with them. Many of them (the Behmen- 
ists, Fifth Monarchy-men, Quakers, and some Anabaptists) 
are proper Fanaticks, looking too much to Revelation within, 
instead of the Holy Scripture." ^ Baxter considers likewise 
that the " Popish Interest " is advanced " by their secret 
agency among the sectaries, Seekers, Quakers, Behmenists, 
etc." ^ The one friend whom Baxter prized from his early 
visit to London (about 1643) was Humphrey Blunden 
" who is since turned an extraordinary Chymist, and got 
Jacob Behmen his works translated and printed." ^ 

The Dr. John Pordage (1607-1681) mentioned by Baxter 
was rector of Bradford from 1647 to 1654 under the patron- 
age of Elias Ashmole, who had become interested in Por- 
dage on account of his knowledge of astrology. In 1647, 
Pordage was tried for incompetency before the committee 
appointed during the interregnum to examine the cases of 
ministers, and the charge against him was dismissed.* In 
1654 he was tried again, and on this occasion removed from 
his living. The accusation of being a mystical pantheist 

^Reliquiae Baxterianae, II, p. 387, § 285. 
^Reliquiae Baxterianae, I, p. 116, § 181. 
^Reliquiae Baxterianae, I, p. 11. 
^Wood: Athenae Oxonienses, II, p. 149. 



96 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

and his friendship for Abiezer Coppe, in 1649 a member of 
his household, worked against him. Coppe was an Ana- 
baptist who later joined the Ranters; in 1651 he had been 
in correspondence with John Dury.^ 

Pordage's relation to Boehme explains the accusation of 
mystical pantheism brought in 1651-1654. Pordage did 
not, however, give up his study of the Teutonic philosopher. 
In 1683 was published his posthumous work, Theologia 
Mystica,^ which Gottfried Arnold praised because it clearly 
and simply explained the hardest part of Boehme's writ- 
ings.^ Pordage, like many men of his time, was strongly 
influenced by astrology and alchemy, full of superstition 
regarding spirits and magic, yet susceptible at the same 
time to the highest mystical influences and inspiration. 
Ennemoser suggests a connection between Boehme and 
Pordage, also between Boehme and Henry More, because 
of the investigation, on the part of both Pordage and More, 
of the Kabalah, which Boehme had studied with his learned 
friend Balthasar Walter.* 

Baxter, the authority on sectaries and " enthusiasts," 
repeats again and again his warnings against Quakers and 
Behmenists. '' The new sects that rise up," he tells us, 
** are as confident that they are in the right and condemn 
all others, as if they had never been warned by the example 
of so many before them. . . . We cannot wonder therefore 
if among other sects, the Quakers (with their German 

* Article, " Coppe " : Dictionary of National Biography. 

^ Theologia Mystica or the Mystic Divinitie of the Aeternal In- 
visible . . . By a person of Qualitie J P M D [John Pordage, 
M.D.] London, 1683. Preface signed J. L. [Jane Lead]. Pub- 
lished by Edward Hooker. 

'Gottfried Arnold: Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, II, p. 1107. 
(Arnold's commendation is hardly justified.) 

* Joseph Ennemoser : Geschichte der Magie, Leipzig, 1844, p. 72. 



BoEHME IN England 97 

Brethren, the Paracelsians, Behmenists and Seekers) do 
step in and take their turns in the game, . . . the Quakers 
that give us their doctrine on a new Authority within them 
(and so Behmenists, Paracelsians and all Enthusiasts) . . . 
All along through most ages these Hereticks have sped, 
even down to the David-Georgians, Weigelians, Familists, 
and the like of late." ^ The Established Church with its 
trained and salaried clergy must be defended against the 
claims of a ministry depending only on the "inner light." 
'' True ministers are like a ' Light that shineth to all the 
house/ " Baxter declares, " but let us try the particulars 
[of sectarian ministry]. I. The Seekers have no church 
or ministry. 2. The Quakers have no ordination. 3. The 
Anabaptists, Socinians, Swenkfeldians, Familists, Para- 
celsians, Weigelians, and such like have no more to show 
for their ministry than we, but their errors; and are so few 
and lately sprung up that of them also I may say, that he 
that taketh them for the only church, or ministers, is either 
out of the faith, or much out of his wits." ^ 

The German origin of this sectarian life, more than hinted 
at in Baxter's pamphlets, was often conceded in the polemics 
against the Quakers and other sects.^ In fact, in his earliest 
mention of Boehme, Baxter sketches the indebtedness of 
the English mystical movement to Paracelsus and the Ger- 
man mystics: "John Arndt magnifieth him [Paracelsus]; 

^ Baxter : One Sheet against the Quakers, London, 1657, pp. i, 
12, 13. 

' Baxter : A Second Sheet for the Ministry justifying our calling 
against Quakers, Seekers, and Papists, and all that deny us to be 
the Ministers of God, London, 1657, p. 12. 

' See The Heart of New England rent at the Blasphemies of the 
present Generation . . . concerning the Doctrine of the Quakers. 
John Norton, London, 1659. Also Johannes Becoldus Redivivus; 
the English Quaker, the German Enthusiast Revived, London? 
[Anony.] 



98 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Weigelius calls him exceedingly illuminated and his The- 
ologie he calls the pure and uncorrupt Scripture of the 
Prophets and Apostles. This Weigelius was the chief of 
his followers and successors. Then steps in John Arndt, 
Julius Sperber, Jesaias Stiefel and Ezekiel Meth, Paul Fel- 
genhauer, and Jacob Behmen, whose books, much taken out 
of Paracelsus, and furthered by Kempis, Taulerus and 
others, are now translated into English by some admirers of 
him, possessed by the same conceits." ^ The general relation 
of the whole English movement to German mysticism is 
shown by the fact that all the accusations which the 
orthodox clergy in Germany brought up against Weigel and 
,Boehme were likewise brought up against the English Inde- 
pendents and Quakers.'^ In Germany these religious-politi- 
cal Separatists would have been called " Weigelianer " and 
" Rosenkreuzer." 

With very few exceptions the early information regard- 
ing the Boehmists and the spread of their doctrines in Eng- 
land comes to us from their opponents, who at least did 
not exaggerate in their favor. Baxter has another men- 
tion of them in 1655 ^ i^ which he groups them with the 
Quakers as persons under the influence of the Papists and 
their doctrines. Baxter may have noted that his century 
marked also a revival of quietistic and mystical devotion 
among English Catholics, as may be seen from their publica- 
tions. John Anderdon writes One Blow at Babel in those 
of the People called Behmenites * in which, amid all his 

^ Baxter : The Unreasonableness of Infidelity; manifested in four 
discourses, London, 1655. See No. 3: For Prevention of the Un- 
pardonable Sin against the Holy-Ghost, p. 147. 

^ Opel : Valentin Weigel, pp. 307-8. 

* Baxter : The Quakers' Catechism, London, 1655. 

* John Anderdon : One Blow at Babel in those of the People called 
Behmenites, whose foundation is not upon that of the Prophets and 



BoEHME IN England 99 

harsh criticism of " imaginary conceptions and carnal 
inventions," he seems obliged to admit that there " some- 
times appeared an excellent spirit in Jacob Behmen in some 
things." Thomas Underbill, in his history of the Quakers,^ 
speaks of a sect, " a more soberer sort, possest with the 
fancies of Jacob Bemon, the German Paracelsian prophet, 
and the Rosicrucians " ; he quotes Baxter's Sin against the 
Holy Ghost. In An Argument for Union,^ 1683, the Beh- 
menists are mentioned in a list of sects that can hardly be 
permitted to associate with Presbyterians and other true 
Christians. 

According to Baxter, as we have seen, the Quakers and 
the Behmenists held very similar beliefs. This was the 
general opinion of contemporary writers on Quakerism.^ 
Lodowick Muggleton states it plainly in his Looking-glass 
for George Fox the Quaker"^; the book called Christianity 
no Enthusiasm, in answer to Thomas Ellwood's Defence ^ 

Apostles, which shall stand sure and firm forever; hut upon their 
own Carnal Conceptions, begotten in their Imaginations upon Jacob 
Behmen's Writings, London, 1662. 

^ Thomas Underbill: Hell broke loose: An history of the Quakers, 
London, 1660. 

^ An Argument for Union taken from the True Interest of those 
Dissenters in England who profess and call themselves Protestants, 
London, 1683. 

* See A. W. Boehme, p. 920, and Colberg, I, pp. 292-308. 

* Looking-glass for George Fox the Quaker and other Quakers, 
London. Reprinted 1756. P. 10: "I suppose Jacob Behmont's Books 
were the chief Books that the Quakers bought, for there is the 
Principle or Foundation of their Religion ... as for what books 
else you Quakers have bestowed money upon since you were 
Quakers, I think the Stationers will neither justify, neither can you 
shew none of any value." 

° Christianity no Enthusiasm: or the several kinds of Inspira- 
tions and Revelations pretended to by the Quakers, tried and found 
destructive to Holy Scripture and True Religion: In Answer to 
Thomas Elwood's Defence thereof in his Tracts, miscalled Truth 
Prevailing, London, 1678, pp. 86-87. 



100 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

compares Boehme's teaching of the opening of the spirit 
within to the Quaker Seed or Birth. The final merging of 
the Boehmenists, as well as of the Familists and the Seekers, 
with the Quakers, was brought about, as the period of the 
religion of enthusiasm was nearing its close, by the dominat- 
ing personality and constructive genius of George Fox, the 
great Quaker leader.^ 

The influence of Boehme on Quakerism was more, how- 
ever, than the merging of two related sects. George Fox 
himself must have read Boehme during the formative period 
of his development. Barclay brings out the striking simi- 
larity of utterance on the part of the two men ; ^ Sippell calls 
it " free quotation from Boehme's writings " on the part of 
Fox.^ " The burden of the mystery of evil in its many 
concrete forms was always upon George Fox's spirit ; " * 
the mystery of evil was the keynote of Boehme's thought. 

Justice Hotham, who presided at one of the many hear- 
ings of George Fox, recognized the identity between Boehme 
and Fox in their teachings regarding the " inner light." 
Fox relates the event in his Journal for 1651. ''Justice 
Hotham : a pretty tender man yt had had some experiences 
of Gods workeinge in his hearte: and after yt I had some 
discourse with him off ye thinges of God hee tooke me into 
his Closett and saide hee had knowne yt principle this 10 
yeere: and hee was glad yt ye Lord did now publish it 
abroad to people." ^ Norman Penney in his notes to the 

* Thomas Hancock : The PecuUum, London, 1907, p. 122. 

^ Robert Barclay : The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of 
the Commonwealth, London, 1876. P. 213 has passages from Fox's 
Journal, 1648, with parallel passages from Boehme. 

'Theodor Sippell: Article on Quakers in Christliche Welt (pub. 
Marburg im Harz) for 1910, p. 436. 

* Braithwaite : Beginnings of Quakerism, London, 1913, p. xliii. 

° The Journal of George Fox edited by Norman Penney. Intro, 
by T. E. Harvey, Cambridge, 191 1, I, p. 18. 



BoEHME IN England ioi 

Journal suggests the identity of this justice with Sir John 
Hotham of Scarborough.^ Sippell speaks of him as Justice 
Durand Hotham, whom we have already met ^ as a disciple 
of Boehme. Justice Hotham was the uncle of Sir John 
Hotham. If Durand Hotham had known of Boehme's 
" principle " for ten years, he must have read Boehme in 
MS. three years before the printing of the latter's works 
was begun in England. 

The Seekers of Westmoreland, under the leadership of 
Thomas Taylor, Francis Howgil, John Camm, and John 
Audland, went over in a body to the Quakers. Certainly 
Thomas Taylor (1618-1682), originally a preacher of the 
Established Church, later a strong Puritan, with his particu- 
lar followers and perhaps some of the other leaders of the 
Seekers, was a devout disciple of Boehme before he became 
a Quaker.^ Other Quakers were students of Jakob Boehme 
before they became followers of George Fox, for instance, 
William Bayley * and F. Eccles, who published prophetical 
passages from Boehme's works.^ 

A change of attitude toward Boehme's teachings on the 
part of the Quakers and a rigorous attempt to rule out his 
influence shows how generally prevalent this interest in 
Boehme had become. The first indication of this change 
of attitude occurred "at a meeting at Rebecca Travers the 
2 1 St 7 mo. 1674. Upon reading of an Epistle of Ralph 

^Journal of George Fox, I, p. 400. 

^ Sippell, p. 440. 

^ Hauck: Nachtrage, 1913. Article on Seekers. Also Braith- 
waite: Beginnings of Quakerism. 

*A collection of the several Wrightings of that True Prophet, 
Faithful Servant of God and Sufferer for the Testimony of Jesus, 
William Bayley, London, 1676, See introduction "to the Reader." 

^ Christian Information concerning these Last times . . . also 
some prophetical Passages gathered out of Jacob Behme's Works: 
F. E[ccles], London, 1664. 



102 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Fretwells to the Behmenists it was agreed upon that a letter 
be writ to him and subscribed by Freinds of this meeting 
giving their reasons why it will not be of service to the 
Truth to print it." ^ In 1675 the first formal order was is- 
sued that in future no books be printed but what are read 
and approved, Ralph Fretwell's epistle to the Behmenites is 
minuted as " not to be published, not suitable, not safe," and 
two printers of the Society were especially cautioned against 
any infringement of these restrictions. ^ A letter of 1676 
in the correspondence of Stephen Crisp shows that there 

*MS. of Morning Meeting Book: I, 1673 to 1692, ff. i, 2. At 
Friends Reference Library, Devonshire House, London. A copy of 
the letter is as follows : " Deare freind R. F. . . . Among other 
things that came before us thy Epistle to the Behmenists was pre- 
sented and read and wee haveing well weighed it in the feare of God 
and in tender care of his Truth did think meet to signifie unto thee, 
that wee are not free it should be printed, hopeing thou wilt acquiesce 
with our Judgments therein, especially when thou knowes our 
reasons; which in short are these: First wee know the Spirit in 
which J. B. wrote many of his writings was not clear, but he lived 
in a great mixture of light and darkness as to his understanding, 
and sometimes the power of the one prevailed and sometimes the 
power of the other. Now the fruit of the one is judged in the day 
of God, and the other comes to its own center and flows forth again 
more purely : Then there being no distinction in thy Tytle, the Foxes 
among them would take advantage against us and the Truth, for 
denying Infants Baptisme, and the Bread, and Wine, and Pater 
Noster etc. for all which he wrote as may be seen, and then to 
tell them thou rec'd Light and power by them, is too much giving 
them encouragement to dwell there, where life is not, but dryness 
and barrenness have followed all who have stuck in his woods, and 
not come down to the seed that opens the misteries of God's King- 
dome in themselves. Soo deare freind hoping this short hint of 
things may tend to thy satisfaction in this matter, wee rest leaving 
thee to the Lord's blessed power, by which thou and many in that 
Island wee understand are blessedly visited praying daily for your 
growth and establishment therein in which farewell. Thy Freinds in 
Truth. 

Steven Crisp, William Gibson, William Bayley and five others." 

^ The London Friends Meetings, London, 1869, p. 342. 



BoEHME IN England 103 

was still a difference of opinion regarding Boehme among 
the members of the Society.^ In 1681, Boehme's works 
were definitely proscribed by the Dublin Men's Meeting 
and a minister silenced for lending them.^ It would appear 
that the reason for this decided change of attitude toward 
Boehme lay in the different beliefs regarding the sacra- 
ments. The Quakers wished to do away with the 
sacraments entirely. Upon the reading of Boehme's work 
Of Chris fs Testaments, published 1652, they began to raise 
objections to Boehme; they avoided more and more the 
peculiar expressions that they had taken from Boehme's 
writings, until one of the early followers of Fox could 
later reproach his leader for now speaking a different lan- 
guage from formerly.^ 

Quakerism, the form under which English Independency 
reached the highest point in the development of ideas of 
freedom, independence, and democracy, the form under 
which after its brief period of political authority it returned 
to more strictly religious ideals, was also the form under 
which the purely religious side of humanism most nearly 
approached the humanism of the free societies and acade- 
mies, that is, in the " Christian society of Friends," the 
name used by Fox in 1653. The first Quakers formed a 
great brotherhood. It was this close union within a firm 
and well-planned organization that made their progress so 
positive and their increase so significant, that made of the 
Quakers, from the first, almost a secret society, like the 
" Friends of God " of the fourteenth century. This or- 
ganization, combined with the important ideas they devel- 

^ Steven Crisp and his Correspondents, 1657-1692. Being a synop- 
sis of the letters of the Colchester Collection. Edited C. Fell 
Smith, 1892, p. 38. 

^ Barclay, p. 479, note. 

^ Sippell, p. 440. See also Troeltsch, p. 907. 



104 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

oped and disseminated, enabled the Quakers, of all the en- 
thusiastic sects of the century, to win a permanent existence 
and to receive into their membership many adherents of 
slightly differing shades of belief. The courageous endur- 
ance, furthermore, of their despised sect — an endurance 
which no persecution could dismay — accomplished wonders 
toward the ultimate dissemination of the ideas animating 
the early teachers of true humanity. The cult-language of 
the Society of Friends, of the Bohemian Brotherhood, of 
the Waldenses, of the Anabaptists, and of the old evangeli- 
cal communities shows many similarities; there are mani- 
fold echoes likewise from the inner circles of the academies 
and the free societies. The Society of Friends stood in 
much closer personal relation to the contemporary secular 
societies of friends, as members of the academies often called 
themselves, than we usually suppose. This characteristic 
emphasis on friendship is shown in the name of the Ger- 
man student academy " Orden der Freundschaft " or 
" Amizisten," which received, curiously enough, among 
other abusive epithets, the name '' Verfluchte Quaker." It 
is interesting to note that the German " Sprachgesell- 
schaften," like the Anabaptists and the Quakers, refused to 
take oath.^ 

Up to this point we have attempted to throw light 
upon the spread of Boehme's writings approximately during 
the lifetime of Milton. Perhaps the greatest proof of the 
impetus that the movement had gained in England, even in 
its earlier years, is shown by its continued growth and vital- 
ity. That which found expression in the middle of the 
seventeenth century in sectarian life, " in the regular so- 
cieties of Behmenists in Holland and England, embracing 
not only tlie cultivated but the vulgar," continued not as a 

^Jkf. C. G., XVI, p. 155, XVII, p. 264. 



BoEHME IN England 105 

sect but as the leavening teaching, philosophical as well as 
devotional, within the recognized churches. There were 
many churchmen who were quite as much followers of 
Boehme as those persons who had left the church to join 
a Behmenite separatist group. A man of this type was 
Edward Taylor (died 1684 in Dublin), whose clear and lucid 
style recommends his explanation of Boehme's principles, 
collected and published in 1691.^ An undated MS. copy 
of the Way to Christ has at the end in another hand 
(unquestionably of the seventeenth century) a series of 
" Pious Meditations " and a " Prayer in time of Affliction " 
that show the owner of the volume to have been an orthodox 
churchman.^ 

A seventeenth-century English society, founded for the 
purpose of studying and explaining the teachings of 
Boehme, a society much smaller and of much less im- 
portance than the Society of Friends and with none of its 
missionary zeal, was the Philadelphian Society. This first 
appeared publicly in London in 1697 and had an organized 
exsitence only until 1704, but it was really part of a group 
of " spiritual people who for above fifty years had met to- 
gether after the primitive way of attendance or waiting 
for the Holy Spirit, to assist them in Praying or Speaking 
to Edification of each other. And these are supposed to 
have had their rise, at least in part, from some English 

* Edward Taylor : Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy Un- 
folded. (With a short account of Boehme's life.) London, 1691. 

^ Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. C. 763. From " A Prayer in time 
of Affliction," f. io6b, "... adding likewise to ye guilt of my 
transgressions, for was it through ignorance that I suffered innocent 
blood to be shed by a false pretended way of Justice; or that per- 
mitted a wrong way of thy worship to be sett up in Scotland? and 
injured the Bi[sho]ps in England? O no ; but with shame and grief e 
I confess that I therein followed the persuasions of worldly wis- 
dome, forsaking the dictates of a right enformed conscience." 



io6 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

mysticks, with whose writings they were conversant and 
afterward from a fresh gale and excitement of the Holy 
Spirit for Revival of that work of God and Preparation of 
His kingdom. This was first experienced by Mrs. Pordage, 
wife of Dr. John Pordage, author of the Theologia Mystica : 
who married her for excellent gift and became himself 
partaker of it. Mr. Thomas Bromeley and Mr. Edmund 
Brice who having heard a sermon preached by Dr. Pordage 
at St. Marie's the University Church [Oxford] went to- 
gether to discourse with him and received such a satisfaction 
from him that they immediately joyned themselves to this 
little society. Also the Earl of Pembroke at this time being 
convinced of the extraordinary Power and Operation of 
the Spirit among them, joyned himself and waited with 
them." 1 

The outcome of this movement was a league of Christians 
who insisted on depth and inwardness of the spirit.^ They 
likewise made plans to emigrate to America, the land of 
Utopian freedom. Jane Lead (1623-1704), who became 
their leader, had been greatly influenced by the Independent 
conventicles of London which she visited in 1643. In 1652 
she came into close relationship with Pordage and Bromley, 
for a time a member of the Pordage household, ardent 
mystics and, as we know, students of Boehme. About 1670 

* Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. D. 833, ff. 64-82. Miscellaneous 
Papers of Richard Roach (1662-1730). He published The Great 
Crisis, 1726 (An account of contemporary mystics, etc.) ; The Im- 
perial Standard of Messiah Triumphant, 1727. Roach was a Phila- 
delphist. 

* The following little volume may be the work of one of the mem- 
bers of this group ; it is a curious dissertation of creation, good and 
evil, on Boehme's principles : Heaven the End of Man or the Final 
Cause of the Soul's Spirit, By William Williams, Teutonico-Phi- 
losopho-Theologus, London, 1696. 



BoEHME IN England 107 

she began writing her many devotional books and pam- 
phlets, founded on Boehme's theology. 

These works of Jane Lead were by a later writer recom- 
mended to the Rosicrucians/ probably the last illustration 
of the connection between Boehme and the alchemists. A 
similar connection is seen in a group of German Pietists ^ 
(they were also called " true Rosicrucians " or " the 
theosophical brotherhood ") under Johann Jacob Zimmer- 
mann (1644-1694), who left Germany for the new world 
in 1693. Zimmermann was one of the best astronomers 
and mathematicians of his day and as such received ac- 
knowledgment from the Royal Society of England. He 
became interested in Boehme through his physician, Ludwig 
Brunnquell, wrote on Boehme, and was finally discharged 
from his pastorate on that account. According to Croese,^ 
Zimmermann became the leader of a group of Behmenist 
Pietists who bore a very close resemblance to the Quakers. 
The emigrants were assisted on their way by the Quakers 
of Holland and the Philadelphists of London; with the lat- 
ter they had considerable intercourse. In Pennsylvania, 
from their settlement on the banks of the Wissahickon, they 
began a movement for systematic education and made the 
first attempt within the bounds of Pennsylvania toward the 
erection and maintenance of a charitable institution for re- 
ligious and moral education. To bring about a union of all 
the various sects into one universal Christian church was 
one of the chief aims of Johann Kelpius, their leader since 
the death of Zimmermann just before the brotherhood sailed 
from Holland. Among the books carried to America by 

' Hermann Fictuld : Probierstein Chymischer Schriften, quoted in 
Zeitschrift fur Historische Theologie, XXXV, p. 201. 
^ Sachse : German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania. 
^ Croese : Qudker-historie, pp. 742 ff . 



io8 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

these men were several complete sets of Boehme's works 
in the Amsterdam edition of Gichtel, 1682, ten volumes.^ 
It is instructive to compare the spirit of freedom and tolera- 
tion in Pennsylvania with the spirit of religious compulsion 
which developed so early in the various colonies of Massa- 
chusetts. In the latter, the memory of escape from oppres- 
sion quickly produced men who would be masters in their 
turn and who evolved from evangelical freedom a religious 
regime with the severity of Old Testament law. The 
Quaker colonies show how greatly the Calvinistic spirit of 
early Puritanism had been modified under the later domi- 
nation of the religion of enthusiasm. 

The writings of Jane Lead (to return for a moment to the 
Philadelphists) were elaborated and published by Francis 
Lee (1661-1719), fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, who 
also published works of his own on Boehme.^ This takes 
us well into the eighteenth century. 

The end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the 
eighteenth century saw, in fact, a number of gifted men 
devoted to Boehme's principles, men such as Lee, George 
Cheyne, Thomas Tryon, Dionysius Andreas Freher, William 
Law.^ 

^ Sachse : p. 53. 

^ For list of Jane Lead's Works published between 1681 and 1704 
see Dictionary of National Biography. See also articles in Zeit- 
schrift fUr Historische Theologie, XXXV, and British Quarterly Re- 
view, LVIII, pp. 181-87. 

Works of Francis Lee : Dissertations. 2 vols. 1752, 

Paraphrase of Boehme's Supersensual Life, printed in Law's edi- 
tion of B., and said by the editors to be by Law, IV, 1781. 

Mystical Poems (in Jane Lead's Works), almost certainly by Lee. 
See Notes and Queries, 4th series, XII, p. 38. See also list of 
works published anonymously, in Dictionary of National Biography, 
and J, H. Overton: William Law, pp. 408-10. 

^ Works of these followers of Boehme not mentioned in Bibliog- 
raphy : 



BoEHME IN England 109 

Freher (1649-1728) was a German philosopher of great 
learning and piety. During the latter years of his life, spent 
in London, he appears to have been entirely taken up with 
the elucidation and illustration of Boehme's writings ; he also 
continually had with him a friend, Leuchter by name, a 
draftsman, to execute the beautiful drawings and symbols 
with which his demonstrations are so abundantly illustrated, 
and to make copies of the same for others. These com- 
mentaries have become known, although they have never 
been published.^ 

William Law (1687- 1762), the greatest of all the expo- 
nents of Boehme, was an eminent scholar of Emmanuel Col- 
lege, Cambridge, who left holy orders because of his refusal 
to take the oath of allegiance to King George L He learned 
German in order to make a complete English edition of 
Boehme's works, based on the careful German edition of 

George Cheyne (1671-1743) : 
Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion . . . 1705. 2nd 

ed., corrected and enlarged, 1715. 
Dr. Cheyne's own Account of Himself and of his Writings 
... 1743. 
Philadelphia Society. 
Propositions . . . extracted from the Reasons for the Founder 

tion of a Philadelphian Society. 1697. 
Theosophical Transactions of the Philadelphia Society. Nos. 
i-S, 1697. See also article in The Dawn, London, Dec, 1862, 
pp. 236-42. 
Thomas Tryon (1634-1703) : 
The Way to Health, 1691. 
Tryon' s Letters, 1700. 
The Knowledge of a Man's Self, 1703. 

Some Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Thomas Tryon (mostly by 

himself). 1705. 

' For a list, see Freher's MSS. in Appendix B, Barker's edition 

of the Threefold Life of Man, taken from Memorial of Law, 

pp. 679-84. These MSS. are in Dr. Williams's Library, Gordon 

Square, London, 



no Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Gichtel, 1730. The accomplishment of this plan was pre- 
vented by Law's death. ^ Perhaps Law's broadest influence 
was felt by that great religious society, " the English 
Pietists of the eighteenth century," the Methodists. Al- 
though their founder John Wesley quarreled with Law and 
wrote disdainfully of Boehme on account of Law's interest 
in his writings, the followers of Wesley read considerably 
more of Law than his famous Christian Perfection and 
Serious Call, written before Law knew Boehme. In 
fact, Boehme's devotional treatises as well as Law's later 
works were to be found among the books of the early Meth- 
odists. 

In any discussion of the formative influences of the seven- 
teenth century^ the importance of Cromwell's army in mold- 
ing opinion as well as in building up a new state-form must 
be borne in mind. " The Sectarian Soldiers much infected 
the Countrys, by their Pamphlets and Converse, and the 
people admiring the' conquering Army, were ready to receive 
whatsoever they commended to them ; and it was the way of 
the Faction to speak what they spake as the Sense of the 
Army, and to make the People believe that whatsoever 
Opinion they vented, it was the Army's Opinion." ^ In this 
army, " tied together by the point of liberty of conscience," 
Jakob Boehme's Morgenrothe im Aufgange (the early title 
for the Aurora) was zealously read.^ For a long time 
Dell, Saltmarsh, William Sedgwick, and Hugh Peters — 
mystics every one and devout preachers of the " inner 
light " — were the chief ministers of the army, and indefat- 

* For discussion of Law's relation to Boehme, see chapter on 
" William Law and the Mystics " in Cambridge History of English 
Literature, IX. 

^ Reliquiae Baxterianae, I, pp. 56-80. 

^ Weingarten, p. 100. 



BoEHME IN England hi 

igable workers. Morgan Lloyd (died 1659), a Welshman, 
son of a Puritan mother, was chaplain of the Parliamentary 
troops during the civil war. In 1646 he was put in charge 
of the parish of Wrexham, where he began writing the nu- 
merous Welsh tracts which proclaim him a follower of 
Boehme. In 1653 was published his Book of Three Birds, a 
work thoroughly Boehmenistic in tone ; he discourses on the 
Heaven and Hell within man, the regeneration and new 
birth of the soul, the God in man as Will, Word or Love, 
and Power. The book is a controversy of two birds, the 
Dove (real Christians) and the Raven (pretended 
Christians) before the Eagle (Oliver Cromwell). Lloyd 
had been much attracted to the Quakers, but, although an 
outspoken Independent, he never joined them and was con- 
sequently roundly scored by George Fox.^ 

Closely connected with the influence of the army, that 
" hot-bed of Independency," was the political influence of 
Boehme's followers, and this in turn was hardly to be dis- 
tinguished from the religious interest. Detached and sep- 
arate from the prevailing parties of the time the keen politi- 
cal genius of Sir Henry Vane the younger stands out 
prominently. Baxter calls the political following of Vane a 
religious sect. Vane^s practical principles are now of recog- 
nized value, though before him no statesman had dreamed 
of a doctrine so thoroughly democratic. " With him ap- 
pears the doctrine of natural right and government by con- 
sent, which, however open to criticism in the crude form of 
popular statement, has yet been the moving principle of the 
modern reconstruction of Europe." This doctrine was the 

* See A. N. Palmer : A History of the Older Nonconformity of 
Wrexham and its Neighborhood, Wrexham, 1888. Also, A Wind- 
ing Sheet for Mr. Baxter's Dead . . . being an Apology for several 
Ministers, London, 1685. 



112 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

result of his recognition of the " rule of Christ in the nat- 
ural conscience," in the elemental reason, by virtue of which 
man is properly a law to himself. From the same idea 
followed the principle of religious toleration, and the prin- 
ciple of excluding the magistrates* power from maintaining 
and restraining any kind of opinion. To Vane, *' the eldest 
son of religion," Milton was content to leave the direction 
of " both spiritual power and civil." ^ Did Milton know the 
source of Vane's inspiration, political as well as religious? 
If we read the latter's Retired Man's Meditations \ we can- 
not fail to find the source; the whole work breathes 
Boehme's teachings. 

A factor in the political situation of the early years of the 
Commonwealth — a factor for a very brief space only — was 
Gerrard Winstanley (1609-c. 1660). His story is soon told 
— a dutiful son of the Established Church who saw, in the 
logical consequences of the doctrine of the " inner light 
that lighteth every man that cometh into the world," the 
marvelous vision of political independence for all men; a 
humble working-man who lived a few years of tremendous 
activity and influence in the rarefied atmosphere of enthu- 
siastic religion and whose work then seemingly came to 
naught when Cromwell assumed the protectorate. Winstan- 
ley was a Seeker, one of the " Children of Light," by some 
considered the spiritual father of Quakerism.^ In matters 
of religion he was closely related to Fox, but there is no 
proof that Winstanley and Fox were personally acquainted. 
Fox may have read Winstanley's many theological pam- 

* Milton's sonnet to Sir Henry Vane the Younger, 1652. 

^ Henry Vane, Knight : A Retired Man's Meditations or the Mys- 
teries and Power of Godliness, London, 1655. See especially chap. 
V, " Creation of Man." See also Hauck, 3rd ed., Nachtrage, article 
on Seekers, and T. H. Green, Works, London, 1888, HI, pp. 294 ff. 

^ Hauck, 3rd ed., Nachtrage : " Seekers." 



BoEHME IN England 113 

phlets that came out in 1648- 1649, the year to which the 
origin of Quaker doctrines is usually ascribed. Winstan- 
ley's main interest, however, was not religious, but social and 
communistic. The Diggers, under his leadership, tried to 
force social reform, beginning with an attempt to reclaim un- 
used land for the community. Winstanley's writings show 
clearly the strong influence of Boehme. Berens ^ speaks of 
the influence of the Familists, but that is not all. Winstan- 
ley treats of creation, of the problem of evil, of the rightful 
independence of man on account of his birthright of reason 
or inner light from God, of all life as a struggle between 
self-love and reason. His political writings culminate in a 
marvelous document, practically as unknown as the wonder- 
ful. Nova Solyma by Samuel Gott,^ that closes the list 
of seventeenth-century Utopian literature, The Law of 
Freedom in a Platform or true Magistracie Restored, Lon- 
don, 1652. " More's Utopia secured for its author world- 
wide renown. Winstanley's is unknown even to his own 
countrymen. Yet let any impartial student compare the 
ideal society conceived by Sir Thomas More — a society 
based upon slavery, and extended by wars carried on by 
hireling, mercenary soldiers — with the simple, peaceful, 
rational, and practical ideal pictured by Gerrard Winstanley 
and it is to the latter that he will be forced to assign 
the laurel crown." ^ The main work of reformation — 
and we are surely reading a follower of Boehme here — is 

^ L. H. Berens : The Digger Movement, London, 1906. 

'^ Nova Solyma, the ideal city; or, Jerusalem regained; an anony- 
mous romance written in the time of Charles I, now first drawn 
from obscurity and attributed to the illustrious John Milton . . . 
by the Rev. Walter Begley, London, 1902. Written by Samuel Gott; 
see The Library (London), July, 1910. 

• Berens, p. 163. 



114 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

to reform the clergy, the lawyers, and the law; for all the 
complaints of the land are wrapped up within these three, 
not in the person of a king. 

In presenting this evidence of the widespread knowledge 
and deep influence of Boehme's writings, we have been 
obliged to emphasize the facts of such a knowledge rather 
than the ideas themselves; these ideas, thus brought from 
their German home, where they had found little possibility 
of becoming an incentive to a broader spiritual life, found 
welcoming hearts in their new English home. Boehme's im- 
portance is due not only to the tremendously valuable ideas 
added by him to the abounding stream of Neoplatonic mys- 
ticism in England, but also to the depth that he gave to 
this stream, to his ability to " be ready always to give an 
answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope 
that is in you with meekness and fear." Others had taught 
the " inner light that lighteth every man," but of the nature 
of man and of that inner light they did not teach, nor could 
they tell of creation, of the origin and reason of the evil 
under which their hearts suffered and bled, of the place of 
evil in the world-system, of why *' God is all in all, and 
Heaven and Hell are within." ^ The manner in which some 
of these thoughts have become a great poet's gift to the 
world will be shown in Boehme's relation to Milton. 

* The Light and Dark Sides of God, or a plain and brief Dis- 
course of The light side, God, Heaven, and Earth, The dark side. 
Devil, Sin, and Hell . . .By Jacob Bauthumley, London, 1650. See 
" Epistle to the Reader." The author is evidently a follower of 
Boehme, although he makes no mention of his master's name. 



IV 
MILTON AND BOEHME 

As a young man Milton's father became a Protestant 
and was consequently disowned by his zealous Catholic 
parents. The poet Milton grew up in a Puritan home 
where religion was not a matter of inheritance but of con- 
viction, and where a feeling for the true inwardness of re- 
ligious life became a part of his very nature. A conscious- 
ness of the essential characteristics of the reformation as 
a continual progress toward the knowledge of things divine 
was Milton's birthright and equipment for life and service. 
Toland says that the poet belonged in youth to the Presby- 
terians, in later life to the Independents and Baptists, and 
that finally he freed himself from all church affiliations. 
Certain it is that while on many questions he came early to 
a definite stand, in others he advanced far beyond the view- 
point of his youth and early manhood. For this reason his 
personality and writings alike hold up a mirror to the spirit- 
ual and intellectual progress of his time. 

Milton's education, his early ideals, and the general course 
of his life were dominated by Puritanism ; ^ not, however, 
the stern, exaggerated Puritanism of a later polemic epoch, 
but an earnest, yet warm devotion to religion that in- 
cluded the beautiful with the good, that found no irre- 
concilable contrast between love of music and poetry and 
love of God. Early in his university career he realized 
that he was to find there no real education for the ministry, 

* Pauli : Aufs'dtze zur Englischen Geschichte, p. 349. 

"5 



ii6 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

to which he had at first hoped to give himself, but rather 
a *' school of divinity that obscured all true religion." When 
in 1642 an opponent reproached him for having wasted his 
time worse than frivolously at the university, he denounced 
in no doubtful terms the whole educational system.^ Nev- 
ertheless, thanks to the care of his father for his earlier 
training, he laid at the university the foundation for his 
scholastic greatness. Moreover, " coming to some ma- 
turity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded 
the church, that he who would take orders must sub- 
scribe slave and take an oath withal, which ... he must 
either straight perjure, or split his faith," he '' thought 
it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred of- 
fice of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and for- 
swearing." 2 

A silence of the pen, however, even under adverse con- 
ditions, was never a part of Milton's plan. His poetical 
aspirations were determining his actions even before the 
ItaHan journey upon which he received so much encourage- 
ment from new friends, so that, as he tells us, " I began thus 
far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here 
at home, and not less to an inward prompting which 
now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study 
(which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with 
the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave some- 
thing so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly 
let it die." ^ At Horton he had been consciously preparing 
in his study of the Greek and Latin authors for greater 
poetic flights. As late as 1642 he had not yet completed 

* Prose Works, III, p. 112: Apology. 

^ Same, II, p. 482 : Church Government. 

^ Same, III, p. 509 : Letter no. XVII. 



Milton and Boehme 117 

" the full circle of his private studies/' ^ His early poetry 
hints at the lofty ideal of a union of classical and Christian 
elements — an ideal which was to characterize the works of 
his later great creative period — but the classical element then 
held by far the larger place in Milton's mind ; ^ he longed to 
know the land in which memory of the greatness and beauty 
of the ancients was still a living power. 

In the spring of 1638 Milton started on his journey to 
Italy. It is interesting to note how quickly he came into 
contact with the academy spirit, not only in the societies, 
the Academia della Crusca and others of Florence and 
Rome,^ but also in academy members. He met Hugo Gro- 
tius * in Paris. In Rome he met Lucas Holstein, who 
showed him particular courtesy and friendliness, to whom 
one of Milton's " familiar letters " is addressed.^ Milton 
also visited Galileo,® the blind " prisoner of the inquisition," 
and, finally, he visited the father of Ezekiel Spanheim of 
Geneva, with whom he later corresponded/ 

From all accounts that we have the journey was entirely 
one of artistic and literary stimulation. Milton was still 
full of the thought of his mission as a poet, who, writing in 
his mother-tongue, should sometime bring honor to his 
native land. Nevertheless his first public acts upon his 
return to London were contrary to this ideal; he began a 
long period of polemic writing. Doubtless his Puritan con- 
science was roused to combat the perverters of true religion, 
the " hireling shepherds." But is that a sufficient explana- 

^ Prose Works, II, p. 476. 

* Stern, I, p. 259. 

^ Masson, I, p. 610. 

*M. C. G., XVI, pp. 122, 234. 

'Prose Works, III, p. 498: Letter no. IX. 

" Masson, I, p. 629. 

' Prose Works, III, p. 509: Letter no. XVII. 



ii8 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

tion of the striking change that is now evident? That the 
change is not superficial we must infer from the long years 
— the best part of Milton's lifetime — of public-spirited de- 
votion to the cause of liberty. Milton employed a most 
effective medium of controversial prose — a medium, how- 
ever, far from congenial to the thoroughly classical inter- 
ests and inclinations of a poet whose instincts and training 
led him rather to the retired leisure of a life devoted to 
" divinest Melancholy." In the academies he came into con- 
tact with men of highest culture and education, whose in- 
terests were not, as we have seen, wholly confined to liter- 
ature and art; the patriotic spirit of Dante whose Divine 
Comedy had rescued his mother-tongue from oblivion was 
still alive. The Academia della Crusca had already be- 
come the model for those centers of interest in national re- 
form and progress, the German " fruchtbringende Gesell- 
schaften." Some of Milton's deepest impressions must 
likewise have come from the publicist-poet Hugo Grotius, 
the first man to teach that the state is a civil contract be- 
tween people and ruler, as opposed to the generally preva- 
lent idea of divine rights of king.^ He must have been im- 
pressed also by the depths of national spirit in the Calvinis- 
tic republic at Geneva. In Rome a conscious spirit of op- 
position seems to have been aroused in him ; he spoke openly 
and decidedly about his religion. Upon his return from 
Italy (1639) Milton entered public life. 

His writings during the period from his return until 
1644 ^re strictly Presbyterian in spirit.^ He is opposed to 

^ De jure belli ac pads, Paris, 1625. See Weingarten, p. 289. 

* ** Of Reformation in England and the causes that hitherto have 
hindered it ; and Of prelatical episcopacy," 1641. " The Reason of 
Church Government urged against Prelaty," 1642. " Animadversions 
upon the Remonstrants Defense against Smectymnuus, and Apology 
for Smectymnuus," 1642. "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," 



Milton and Boehme 119 

prelaty, to church forms lingering on from the days of 
the Roman church, to the prevailing influences in the 
universities, to the deadening scholasticism of his age. 
At the same time he expresses clearly the belief in a 
state church without bishops, and in predestination. Man 
is born impure, subject to the prince of this world, the devil; 
punishment and hell await the unelect; the elect are to be 
saved through the merits of Christ and his reconciliation. 

The idea of freedom, however, has been steadily develop- 
ing through this period, in the great advance made from a 
hierarchical, bishops' church to the somewhat more demo- 
cratic Presbyterian form. In the tracts on divorce, Milton 
works out his ideas of freedom along domestic lines. The 
personal equation enters deeply here, to be sure, in his bit- 
ter reiteration of the strictly orthodox ** chief end of 
woman " and her rights — to absolute subserviency. But 
the sacrament of marriage becomes under his exposition 
the civil contract that it had been among the old German 
races before the Roman church, during the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries, absorbed it as an additional hold upon 
the mind of freeborn man.^ 

The writings of the year 1644, before the completion of 
the series on divorce, mark further progress in Milton's 
views, a greater advance toward liberty. These are the 
Areopagitica and the Tractate on Education, dealing re- 
spectively with freedom of speech and education to free- 
dom. 

The Tractate on Education was dedicated to Samuel 
Hartlib, at whose " earnest entreaties and serious conjure- 
ments " it was written, at a time when Milton's mind was 

1643. " Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce," 1644. 
" Tetrachordon," and " Colasterion," 1645. 
^ Weinhold : Die Deutschen Frauen, I, pp. 357-58. 



120 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

"half diverted in the pursuance of some other assertions, 
the knowledge and the use of which cannot but be a great 
truth, and honest living with much more peace " ^ — the 
works on divorce. This is the first mention of the friend- 
ship between these men which may well have begun, how- 
ever — as Milton's reference to " incidental discourses into 
which we have wandered " seems to suggest — some time 
before this writing appeared. Hartlib came to England in 
1629. From a letter of his, June, 1638, to Joseph Meade of 
Christ's College, Cambridge, Milton's former tutor, we see 
that he was living in a house in Duke's Place in London, 
not far from the house Milton took on his return from 
the continent. There Hartlib remained, it appears, until 
1650, when he removed to Charing Cross in the neighbor- 
hood of Whitehall.^ Milton had moved in 1647 to High 
Holborn; in 1650, as secretary of the Commonwealth, he 
removed to Charing Cross for a time, then to Whitehall, 
and then to Petty-France. Although there is but scanty 
record of the friendship between Milton and Hartlib, there 
is no reason to suppose that it terminated before Hartlib's 
death. In 1654 a Leyden correspondent, probably Dury, 
writes to Hartlib suggesting that Milton will find material 
for his controversy with More if he will write to Geneva.^ 
Hartlib often mentions Milton in his letters to Boyle.* In 
1660 an Amsterdam correspondent, possibly Adam Boreel, 
asks Hartlib what the Restoration is doing to Milton.'^ It 

* Prose Works, III, p. 462 : Ojt Education. 
' Althaus, p. 205. 

' British Museum, Sloane MS. 649, f . 30 : " Mori contra Miltonum 
Apologiam vidisse vos credo. Si Miltonus de Mori testimoniis 
certiora nosse cupit, scribat Genevam, et ad viduam Salmasianam, 
qua ipsi abunde suppeditabit materiam." 

* Boyle's Works, V. 

" British Museum, Sloane MS. 649, f . 41 : " De Miltono, et cap- 
tivis, quid actom fuerit, aut egetur, proximis tuis mihi rescribes." 



Milton and Boehme 121 

would have been remarkable indeed if a zealous man like 
Hartlib, " the stimulus to all good in England," as one of 
his correspondents called him/ had been unable to attract 
Milton and interest him for his plans. In addition to that, 
Hartlib's religious and political ideas could not fail to be 
congenial to those of the poet. 

The group of friends most closely associated with Hart- 
lib during the years 1640- 1660 included Haak, Pell, Dury, 
Boyle, Oldenburg, and Comenius, during the latter's visit 
to London — all men filled, as we have seen, with the re- 
form ideas of the free societies and of Valentin An- 
dreae. Milton's ambition to glorify his mother-tongue, 
his tendency to unite in his poetry the beauty of antiquity 
with the moral greatness of Christianity, his broad interest 
in nations other than his own, his opposition to scholasti- 
cism, his activity in the interest of reform in church and 
school — all these interests made him a congenial member of 
this circle of friends to which Hartlib introduced him. 
Milton mentions " our friend Dury " in one of his letters ; ^ 
Haak and Pell were his friends ; ^ four letters of his cor- 
respondence with Oldenburg are preserved; Boyle was a 
brother of Milton's friend. Lady Ranelagh, whose son was 
a pupil first of Milton, then of Oldenburg. We might read- 
ily expect also that a man like Milton would become ac- 
quainted with the celebrated foreigner Comenius; that 
seems, however, not to have been the case, if we may judge 
from Milton's hardly friendly allusion to two of Comenius's 
best-known works : " to search what many modern Januas 
and Didactics,* more than ever I shall read, have pro- 

^ Stern, II, p. 282. 

^ Prose Works, III, p. 518, to John Badians. 
^ Stern, II, p. 280. 

* Among Comenius's works are Janua linguarum reservata, Janua 
rerum, Didaktika magna. 



122 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

jected." ^ Nevertheless he thoroughly agreed with Come- 
nius that language is merely the instrument of knowledge. 
Haak, whom Milton may likewise have known earlier 
(Haak studied theology in Cambridge and Oxford about 
1625), returned permanently to England in 1629 after a 
brief stay on the continent. For a short time Haak was 
deacon under Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter. He seems, 
then, to have lived without office in London, in close asso- 
ciation with Pell, Selden, Hartlib, and the Swabian poet 
Weckherlin; he was an attentive friend of German visitors 
to England, Comenius and Hermann Mylius among others. 
Haak translated many theological works from Dutch into 
English, also from English into German, and was the first 
to translate Paradise Lost into German. To Johann 
Seobald Fabricius, brother of the influential Heidelberg 
court preacher, he sent a copy of his translation of the first 
three books and part of the fourth. The work was never 
printed but was used by Ernst Gottlieb von Berge in his 
translation of Paradise Lost, Zerbst, 1682.^ 

In 1645 Haak suggested the organization of the " philo- 
sophical " or " invisible college," the membership of which 
is represented by such men as Pell, Dury, Boyle, and Olden- 
burg. These men are generally known as the investigators 
in mathematics and science who later became members of 
the Royal Society. Not all members of the '' invisible col- 
lege," however, took an active part in investigation, nor was 
that the only interest of the society. Plans of reform seem 
to have been represented by various individuals, perhaps 
merely closely associated with the " college " and not really 
members of it, such as Dury's great work to bring about 

* Prose Works, III, p. 464: On Education. 

^ Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte und Renais- 
sance-Litteratur, Neue Folge, I, pp. 428, 431-32. 



Milton and Boehme 123 

the union of all Protestant churches into one great united 
world church, Hartlib's efforts toward the increase of wealth 
and general prosperity through the use of improved agri- 
cultural methods, and Milton's far-reaching activity in the 
struggle for separation of church and state. 

The Areopagitica, a plea for the privilege of printing 
without a license, which appeared late in 1644, is the formal 
expression of Milton's changed attitude; thus he attached 
himself to the rapidly growing Independent party. New 
oppressors had arisen in the persons of the former apostles 
of freedom. The Presbyterians, since the autumn of 1643 
the ruling power in the state church, had only too quickly 
learned to feel at home in the role of prelates. Formerly 
they had insisted upon freedom of the press — a view 
opposed by the Episcopal censors ; later they used this freed 
press against the bishops. Now, however, when this same 
freedom might be used in opposition to their plans of church 
reform (a mere change in form and title), the Presbyterians 
had to disregard their early views about the freedom of 
the press. For the growth of religious truth, Milton de- 
manded free discussion within the church, an unhindered 
development of differences among the believers themselves, 
in a word, religious toleration. For him Protestantism 
must cease when implicit faith is demanded.^ The apostle 
of freedom explains the origin of censorship — invented by 
the popes as a weapon against the Reformation, then adopted 
by the English prelates, and finally inherited by the Presby- 
terians. An invention might be good, whoever the in- 
ventor, but censorship turned out to be as subversive of 
liberty as the worst enemy of liberty could desire, since it 
protected neither author nor reading public, to both of whom 
its mere existence was a degrading insult. The problems 
* Liebert : Milton, p. 164. 



124 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

of evil and of free-will come up in the Areopagitica. In dis- 
cussing them Milton appears to be not entirely decided per- 
haps, but certainly already at variance with the orthodox 
Presbyterian dogma on these questions which were later 
to constitute the basis of his great poetical works. " It 
was from out of the rind of an apple tasted, that the 
knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, 
leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is the doom 
which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil ; that is to 
say, of knowing good by evil." ^ ''Many there be that 
complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to trans- 
gress. Foolish tongues ! When God gave him reason, he 
gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he 
had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he 
is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedi- 
ence or love, or gift, which is of force." ^ 

This liberty of printing was to apply not only to Latin, 
the tongue of the learned, but to the language of the people 
as well, so that if " any one would write and bring his help- 
ful hand to the slow-moving reformation which we labor 
under, if truth have spoken to him before others, or but 
seemed at least to speak," ^ his message might be heard. 
Hartlib, in his Macaria, three years before, had named in 
the " natural causes of reformation a spread of knowledge 
through the press, that the common people, knowing their 
own rights and liberties, will jffbt be gover^^d by way of 
oppression." * Thus we see a striking similarity of thought 
on the part of Milton, Hartlib's personal friend. 

The four years 1645 to 1649 represent in Milton's public 

* Prose Works, II, p. 6y : Areopagitica. 

^ Same, p. 74. 

^ Same, p. 98. 

^Harleian Miscellany, IV, p. 386: Macaria. 



Milton and Boehme 125 

life a pause during which, aside from the sonnets against 
the Presbyterians and to Fairfax, he published nothing. In 
this period, the struggle between king and people reached 
its climax. The four years form for Milton not a pause for 
rest, but a pause for work, for preparation for new and 
extraordinary activity. Before this he had said farewell 
to poetry to devote himself to theology ; now he turned from 
theology to politics. From his later writings we learn that 
he spent this time largely in the study of the history, consti- 
tution, and laws of his native land. In the Tenure of Kings 
and Magistrates, February, 1649, written at his own initi- 
ative to allay the wild strife of feelings and opinions called 
forth by the imprisonment of King Charles,^ he strikes at 
once the keynote of his independency. The attitude of 
toleration to a state church is entirely changed. The state 
is the highest point, the fulfillment, of the demands of 
moral life, and it must be as free from the domination of 
church and priest as the religious life is from interference 
on the part of the state. He demands entire freedom as 
opposed to the half freedom of the Presbyterians. The 
source of power is with the people ; this power is by them, 
for the general welfare, entrusted to the sovereign ; there ex- 
ists no divine right of kings to be tyrants ; if kings misuse 
power, the people who gave it are at liberty and have the 
duty to take it back. He shows that the new republic rests 
on a firm historical foundation; it is not only genuinely 
English, but genuinely Protestant as well. 

Milton's interests and plans during these seemingly quiet 
years bear a notable resemblance in national, educational, 
and religious import to the general plans of Hartlib's group 
of friends : the perfecting of a Latin grammar, the construc- 
tion of a system of Christian theology based entirely on the 

* Written before but published after the execution of Charles I. 



126 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Bible, and the completion of the history of the English peo- 
ple, of which he had already written four books in which 
there breaks forth the strong patriotic feeling of the old 
Saxons, in the contention that the Norman conquest was 
never a real subjugation of the spirit of the people. All 
these plans were changed by Milton's sudden and unex- 
pected call to public life (in March, 1649), ^s secretary of 
foreign languages to the Commonwealth. His predecessor 
in this office under Charles I had been Georg Rudolf Weck- 
herlin, a talented German living in England since 1624, 
member of the " Akademie zur Tanne," ^ a friend of Hart- 
lib, Haak, Pell, and Dury.^ Later Weckherlin was reap- 
pointed as Milton's assistant. Haak seems also at times 
to h^ve been of service to the foreign secretary in translating 
documents into Dutch. ^ 

One of the most influential men with whom Milton was 
now associated was Sir Henry Vane. An idealist like 
Milton, he was filled with the hope that a happy era 
had now dawned for England. Their agreement regarding 
the offices of church and state Milton celebrates in his 
sonnet to Vane: 

"To know 

Both spiritual power and civil, what each means, 

What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done; 

The bounds of either sword to thee we owe; 

Therefore, on thy firm hand religion leans 

In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son." 

Vane's devotion to public service and his freedom from 
corruption were as well known as his great ability. But 

^M. C. a, IV, p. 76. 

" Stern, I, 26. 

^ Stern, p. 27. Interested in Dury's plans at least since 1634, 
See " Bibliothek des Literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart," CCXLV, 
p. 76. 



Milton and Boehme 127 

some of his contemporaries found it difficult to understand 
his religious views, and his enthusiasm for mysticism ex- 
posed him to the reproach of fanaticism and to a notoriety 
(as in the case of Milton) of having a sect named after him. 
Vane was tolerant of all sects, and was particularly attracted 
to the Quakers. 

Another friend whose devotion to kindred ideals must 
have influenced Milton's views on the great problems that 
Parliament and Cromwell with his soldiers had been trying 
to solve was Roger Williams. In 1631 Williams had emi- 
grated to America, and had been chosen pastor of the 
congregation of Salem. He was driven from the colony, 
however, because he demanded unconditioned religious free- 
dom and a complete separation of church and state, with 
equal rights for all, even for Jews and heretics. His ex- 
traordinary strength of religious interest found expression 
in his many pamphlets and treatises. " To destroy a single 
soul through false teaching/' he maintained, " is a worse 
crime than to disperse a whole parliament or to slay an en- 
tire nation." ^ He founded Providence, 1636, and with a 
conscientiousness rare in English colonists paid the Indians 
for their land.^ Other fugitives brought to this colony Bap- 
tist ideas, which Williams adopted. Soon, however, he 
found their teachings insufficient, and left the congregation 
never to join another church because he awaited further 
enlightenment regarding the essence of the true church of 
God. Through this step he became an exponent of the 
fundamental ideas of Independency and a significant fore- 
runner of Quakerism. His doctrine of the " sovereign 
original and foundation of Civil Power in the People " ap- 
peared in his pamphlets scattered broadcast in England be- 

^ Baillie : Letters, II, p. 397. 
^Weingarten, p. 37. 



128 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

fore the outbreak of the civil war. He speaks of his as- 
sociation with Milton during his second visit to England in 
1651-1652: "The Secretary of the Council Mr. Milton 
for my Dutch I read him, read me many more languages/' ^ 
Roger Williams had "very probably acquired the Dutch 
tongue and with it some of the principles which charac- 
terize his life's work, from the Dutch colonists who 
were scattered throughout the southern and eastern counties 
of England, and in London, the descendants of those who 
sought a refuge in England when Charles V. began his 
persecution of the Protestants in the Netherlands." ^ 

In Eikonoklastes (1649) ^^^ the first and second Defense 
of the People of England (1649 ^^^ 1654), Milton expresses 
with prophetic ardor his final ideas about the unconditioned 
sovereignty of the people. In Considerations touching the 
Likliest Means to remove Hirelings out of the Church 
(1659), h^ works out his idea of absolute religious freedom 
and congregational church autonomy, a toleration extended 
to all Christian sects, among which however Catholics are 
for state reasons not included, since their religious and 
political tenets are inseparable. 

The change in Milton's sympathy during these years from 
the Presbyterian to the Congregational viewpoint is clearly 
paralleled by the progress of stirring events in his time. A 
further development of his inner life along lines of the re- 
ligion of enthusiasm is equally characteristic of his time, 
though less fully taken into account by his biographers. 
This development is nowhere more clearly apparent than in 
the growth of his conception of the poet. In his early 
poetry, " the relation of the Muse or Muses to the poet, as 

* Narragansett Club Publications, VI, p. 258, Letters of Roger 
Williams. 
^ Straus : Roger Williams, p. 181. 



Milton and Boehme 129 

it appears in Milton, is much the same as that in Homer, 
Hesiod, and the later poets and imitators/' ^ In the poems 
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1. 15) and The Pas- 
sion (1. 4) he addresses the " Heavenly Muse/' In Lycidas 
(1. 15) he invokes the 

"sisters of the sacred well 
That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring" 

and " in imitation of Vergil or Moschus," bids the " Sicilian 
Muse" return (1. 133). In // Penseroso (1. 47) he 

" hears the Muses in a ring 
Aye round about Jove's altar sing." 

Imagination has now the office which later he gives to 
inspiration : 

" Befriend me night, best patroness of grief, 
Over the pole thy thickest mantle throw. 
And work my flattered fancy to belief, 
Though Heaven and Earth are coloured with my woe/* 

Passion, 11. 29-32. 

"To our high-raised fantasy present 
That undisturbed song." 

Solemn Music, 11. 5-6. 

" Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving 
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving." 

Shakespeare, 11. 13, 14. 

In his early prose writings we find not only the general 
Puritan belief in the inspiration of ministers of the Gospel, 
but also the belief in the possible inspiration of poets. On 
an equality with ministers he places the poet whose "abili- 
ties are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, but yet to 
some (though most abuse) in every nation; and are of 

* Osgood : Classical Mythology of Milton's English Poems, p. 57. 



130 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

power, beside the office of the pulpit, to inbreed and cherish 
in a great people, the seeds of virtue and public civility; 
... to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne 
and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works, and 
what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his 
church . . . Nor [is this gift] to be obtained by the invo- 
cation of dame memory and her siren daughters, but by 
devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with 
all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, 
with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the 
lips of whom he pleases." ^ 

In his later poetry we find, along with many references 
to the traditional Muses, his final conception of the poet 
as a truly inspired oracle whose Muse is the Holy Spirit of 
God. We will return later to this point. 

The change in religious sympathy is shown in the 
Eikonoklastes. Milton expresses his objection to set forms 
of prayer, — an objection in which all the sectarians and sep- 
aratists were agreed : " This is evident, that they who use 
no set forms of prayer, have words from their affections; 
while others are to seek affections fit and proportionable to 
a certain dose of prepared words; which as they are not 
rigorously forbid to any man's private infirmity, so to im- 
prison and confine by force, into a pinfold of set words, 
those two most unimprisonable things, our prayers, and 
that divine spirit of utterance that moves them, is a tyranny 
that would have longer hands than those giants who 
threatened bondage to heaven." ^ " God is no more moved 
with a prayer elaborately penned, than men more truly 
charitable are moved with the penned speech of a beggar." ^ 

^ Prose Works, II, p. 479 : Reason of Church Government. 
^Same, I, p. 431: Eikonoklastes. 
^Same, I, p. 462. 



Milton and Boehme 131 

The Scriptures become more and more Milton^s final 
authority. He reminds members of Parliament of their 
duty '' to assert only the true Protestant Christian religion, 
as it is contained in the Holy Scriptures " and he asserts 
" that we can have no other ground in matters of religion 
but only from the Scriptures." ^ In his later years, more- 
over, Milton carried out his early plan of formulating for 
himself a system of Christian doctrine from the Scriptures 
alone. Willingly he advocates dependence on the " inner 
light," and submits his fallible reason to the sure informa- 
tion afforded by celestial light. " The gospel [is] to be in- 
terpreted only by the sense of charity and inward persua- 
sion." 2 '' No protestant therefore, of what sect soever, 
following Scriptures only, which is the common sect wherein 
they all agree, and the granted rules of every man's con- 
science to himself, ought by the common doctrine of protes- 
tants to be forced or molested for religion." ^ " God com- 
pels by the inward persuasive motions of his spirit." * Any 
man may become a minister of God, since " the Gospel 
makes no difference from the magistrate himself to the 
meanest artificer, if God evidently favor him with spiritual 
gifts." ^ ** It is a fond error, though too much believed 
among us, that the university makes a minister of the gos- 
pel." ^ Moreover, it was no lifeless belief in the Scriptures 
that Milton was insisting upon ; far more important than the 
outer word was the inner word of the Spirit. This is the 

^ Prose Works, II, pp. 521, 523 : Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesi- 
astical Causes. 

' Same, II, p. 537- 

^ Same, II, p. 532 : Treatise of Civil Power, etc. 

* Same, p. 538. 

"Same, III, p. 40: Consideration How to Remove Hire- 
lings, etc. 

" Same, III, p. 36. 



132 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

point in which the poet was inseparably linked to what was, 
since 1644, the fundamental thought of Independency. 

In addition to unscriptural views of predestination and 
election Milton has been accused of heterodox teachings re- 
garding the divinity of Christ, in Paradise Lost, Paradise 
Regained, and, most of all, in the Christian Doctrine.^ 
The expressions in his earlier works regarding the Trinity 
are unquestionably orthodox. 

" That glorious form, that light unsufferable, 
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty, 
Wherewith He wont at Heaven's high council-table 
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity." ^ 

" Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory unap- 
proachable. Parent of angels and men! next, Thee I im- 
plore. Omnipotent King, Redeemer of that last remnant, 
whose nature Thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting 
Love ! And Thou, the third subsistence of divine infinitude, 
illumining Spirit, the joy and solace of created things! 
One Tripersonal Godhead! look upon this thy poor and 
almost spent and expiring Church." ^ 

The change in Milton's views from strict orthodoxy to 
complete toleration, to a disregard for denominational lines 
and an utter dependence on the " inner light," is accom- 
panied by his changed attitude toward the " visible church." 
Bishop Newton remarks '' that in the latter part of his life 
Milton was not a professed member of any particular sect of 
Christians, that he frequented no publick worship, nor 
used any religious rite in his family. Whether so many 
different forms of worship as he had seen had made him in- 
different to all forms ; or whether he thought that all Chris- 

^ Todd : Life of Milton, p. 323. 

' Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 

^ Prose Works, U, p. 417 : Of Reformation in England. 



Milton and Boehme 133 

tians had in some things corrupted the purity and simplicity 
of the Gospel ; or whether he disliked their endless and un- 
charitable disputes and that love of dominion and inclination 
to persecution which he said was a piece of popery insepa- 
rable from all churches; or whether he did not look upon 
himself inspired, as wrapt up in God, and above all forms 
and ceremonies ; it is not easy to determine : to his own mas- 
ter he standeth or falleth : but if he was of any denomina- 
tion, he was a sort of Quietist, and was full of the interior 
of religion, though he so little regarded the exterior." ^ 
It has been suggested that Milton^s blindness and other in- 
firmities might be in part his excuse for frequenting no 
place of public worship. Certain it is that his daily em- 
ployments were always ushered in by devout meditation 
and study of the Scriptures. 

Such a life of religious meditation, however, of regard 
for the inner religion and disregard for its outer forms, 
of Quietistic contemplation, was developed in the sectarian 
life of England after Cromwell's final assumption of the 
authority that had rested with the " Parliament of Saints " ; 
it is the religious life we should expect of a student of Jakob 
Boehme. Such a life was exemplified by the Quakers, the 
Philadelphists, the members of the " Theosophical Rosicru- 
cian Brotherhood " that emigrated to Pennsylvania. Such 
a life is reflected in the religious convictions of Milton's 
friend, Roger Williams, with whom he may have read 
Boehme's writings in Dutch, since most of them were pub- 
lished very early in that language. Todd suggests, as an ex- 
planation of the change of view in Milton's later writings, 
that " he drank largely perhaps from the turbid streams " 
of the *' Arian and Socinian pieces published in Holland 

' Todd, p. 333. 



134 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

and dispersed in England." ^ These convictions were like- 
wise held by Henry Vane, who was undoubtedly influenced 
by the writings of Jakob Boehme. 

Milton might have seen German copies of Boehme's 
works brought to England by fugitives from the Thirty 
Years' War. There is evidence that the poet included 
among his linguistic accomplishments the ability to 
read German.^ Dr. Pagit, Milton's physician and friend, 
intimate likewise in the household of the Quaker Isaac 
Pennington, recommended the young Quaker .Thomas 
Ellwood,^ who read to the blind poet and to whom is 
ascribed the suggestion that resulted in Paradise Re- 
gained. Milton's large circle of German friends were, 
moreover, the practical carriers of many ideas that Boehme 
embodied in his philosophy.* And it is beyond question that 
Hartlib at least was intimately acquainted with the teach- 
ings and writings of Boehme. 

Among the comparatively few state papers that Milton 
preserved from his secretaryship and prepared for publica- 
tion is an address to Parliament in 1653 by Mr. Samuel 
Herring, which shows in the matters suggested for the 
" honorable considerations " of the members a striking 
similarity to Milton's views : " That it may be lawfull for 
all men, of what degree or quality soever, to teach the 
word, according to there light, and the spirit's illumination, 
and to settle themselves in the ministry, giving good testi- 
mony of there inward call thereunto by the spirit. 

" That liberty of conscience, in matters of religion, should 
be freely granted to all people, provided they submitt, and 

^Todd, p. 322. 

''Stern: Life of Milton, III, p. 31. 

^ Masson, VI, p. 469. 

* See above, pp. 65, 89. 



Milton and Boehme 135 

shall live quietly and peaceably, under the government of 
this Commonwealth ; for religion is soe difficult and tender, 
that it is beyond man's reach, rightly to judge of it. 

" That all possible meanes should be used for uniting the 
clergie throughout the land into one universall body, soe 
that they should lay asyde all there writing bookes and 
disputations ; they should only labour after unity, peace and 
concord. 

" That two colledges in each university, shall be sett 
apart for such as shall wholly and solely apply themselves 
to the studdy of attaining and enjoying the spirit of our 
Lord Jesus, to which study needs few bookes, or outward 
humane helps (for all lyeth in man's willinge and yeeldinge 
himself e up to his inward teacher) soe that only the holy 
scriptures would be sufficient, but that the noble mind of 
man soaringe beyond the letter, or rule held out from the 
same, therefore the workes of Jacob Behmen, and such 
like, who had true revelation from the true spirit, would be 
great furtherance thereunto; and none but the holy scrip- 
tures, and such bookes aforesaid, should be used in thee 
colledges, all in English. This study rightly attained, would 
confute and confound the pride and vaine glory of outward 
humane learning, strong reason, and high astrall parts, and 
would shew men the true ground and depth of all things ; for 
it would lead men into the true nothinge, in which they 
may behold and speculate all things, to a clear satisfaction 
and contentednesse." ^ 

Is it possible that Milton heard no mention of Boehme, 
not among his German friends who shared Boehme's pro- 
gressive ideas, nor among his religious friends whose doc- 
trines were supported by Boehme's teachings, nor among 
his political friends in whose army Boehme was read? 

^ State Papers, pp. 99, 100. 



136 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Through his connection with the academy spirit of his time, 
with the movement of Independency and of religious tol- 
eration, Milton was being unconsciously led to an interest 
in Boehme, whose writings he might have come across in 
English or German any time after 1644. It will now be 
our task to show that such an interest really did exist. 



CHAPTER V 

SIMILARITY BETWEEN MILTON AND BOEHME 

IN RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND 

POLITICAL IDEAS 

As Shown in ''Paradise Lost/' "Paradise Regained/' 
AND " Christian Doctrine " 

Interpreters of Milton agree that he was not exclusively 
Platonic, Hellenic, Hebraic, medieval, nor modern, yet so 
strong has been the traditional belief in his classicism that 
the other formative elements of his lifework have hardly 
received just appreciation. Every discussion of the He- 
braic and medieval elements has overlooked one fact; these 
two elements were fused in the new humanism of the sev- 
enteenth century that transformed the curious interest in 
the individual into a reverent love for the race. If Milton 
is not to be considered in the narrower sense either classicist 
or romanticist, what facts really explain his evident sym- 
pathy with two such widely differing views of the universe? 
His poetry exemplifies the necessary relation between a 
definite philosophic purpose and art; his imagination is in- 
spired only to raise the soul of man to ever higher purpose 
and endeavor. This breadth and clarity of vision separates 
Milton from the brilliant men of the Renaissance, to whom 
he is so closely related through his enormous store of classi- 
cal learning. To the intellectuality of true classicism he 
added not only a deep and reverent interest in each human 

137 



138 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

being but also an implicit faith in the inherent power of 
all humanity to develop and press forward according to the 
eternal truths of life. These truths are found in and above 
this life; through them all actions take place, not as men 
sometimes suppose, in contradiction, but in an eternal, all- 
inclusive harmony. The intimate relation of this teaching 
^ to life itself was Milton's legacy to after-times ; it had been 
V Boehme's legacy to Milton. In becoming secretary to the 
Commonwealth Milton had identified himself with the move- 
ment of democracy; he was willing to stake his life in be- 
coming officially associated with that man of the people, 
Oliver Cromwell. The people's great prophet of democ- 
racy was Boehme. In this excited time, saturated with the 
feeling of democracy and its hopes, Jakob Boehme, simple, 
sincere man of the people, shoemaker, tradesman, seemed, 
as did Christ and the apostles, a God-inspired prophet of 
yj the people. Some of Boehme's ideas were absolutely ex- 
pressive of the popular feeling — ideas of opposition to a 
university-made clergy, to unjust princes, to war, belief in 
feeling as the basis of religious life, in the necessity of 
true regeneration, of the " inner light." There was of 
course much in Boehme that these ardent disciples had 
never grasped and made no attempt to understand. But 
Milton penetrated into " the Teutonic philosophy," beneath 
the veil of language that obscured its meaning, and became 
one of the first to share Boehme's true Weltanschauung. 

The acceptance of the belief in the " inner light," and the 
conception of the divinely inspired poet — so opposed to the 
traditional idea of poetic inspiration of which we have 
spoken — marks the change in spirit and method between 
Milton's earlier and later poetry. In his later years the 
poet became a man inspired by God, in his blindness seeing, 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 139 

because dependent wholly upon the guidance of the light 
within. 

"So much the rather thou, Celestial Light, 
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers 
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence 
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
Of things invisible to mortal sight." 

P. L., Ill, 51^55. 

His Muse is the Holy Spirit, the 

"Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top 
Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire 
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed 
In the beginning how the heavens and earth 
Rose out of Chaos." 

P. L., I, 6-10. 

"Thou Spirit, who led'st this glorious Eremite 
Into the desert, his victorious field 
Against the spiritual foe, and brought'st him thence 
By proof the undoubted Son of God, inspire, 
As thou art wont, my prompted song, else mute." 

P. L., I, 8-12. 

This poet feels the community of truth in the disparate 
elements of Hellenism and Christianity, but, with a con- 
sistency greater than in the earlier poems, ascribes to all 
the Ionian gods and their oracles a close relationship with 
the powers of evil. A consciousness of his lofty mission 
adds, in the later poems^ a certain conciseness and severity 
to the sensuously beautiful descriptions of the earlier poems. 

A first evidence of Milton's interest in Boehme is his 
choice of the full subject of his great poems Paradise 
Lost and Paradise Regained. Much has been written, 
with undoubted fidelity to truth, regarding an indebtedness 
to Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas, Andreini's 
Adamo, Hugo Grotius' Adamus Exul, Vondel's Lucifer, 
Michael Angelo's pictured story of Adam and Eve in the 



140 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Sistine chapel at Rome, and various other works on the 
same theme. In the fall of Lucifer, the creation of the 
earth, and the fall of the first human beings Milton was 
treating one of the most popular subjects of his time. The 
theme was fresh in the popular mind in the dramatic litur- 
gical plays of the Middle Ages, and had been treated in 
Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, 
Dutch, and English. That does not tell, however, how Mil- 
ton really came to choose this particular theme. From the 
Mansus (1. 78) and the Epitaphium Damonis (11. 155-178), 
written 1639, we know of his plans for a national epic or 
poem from British legendary history. In 1641 ^ he ques- 
tions " what king or knight, before the conquest, might be 
chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero " and 
suggests that the Scriptures also afford subjects, in the 
Song of Solomon and the Apocalypse of St. John. Also 
sketches from about the same time for a tragedy Paradise 
Lost are preserved.^ The epic, which incorporated some 
of these early speeches, was begun about 1658 and finished 
1663.^ 

Was it because Milton was ''on evil days though fallen 
and evil tongues," that his work presents as its theme the 
origin and final overthrow of evil? In all of Boehme's 
larger works and in most of his pamphlets and epistles, the 
1 1 central theme, more or less elaborately worked out, is the 
origin of evil — not evil as confined to our human experi- 
ence alone, but evil as a factor in the whole universe, its 
origin and final overthrow. In nearly every case Boehme 
gives a highly poetic and imaginative, yet philosophical, ac- 
count of the fall of Lucifer followed by the fall of Adam 

^ Prose Works, II, pp. 478, 479. 

^ MS. in Trinity College, Cambridge. 

^ Stern, IV, p. 49. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 1411 

and Eve ; the two " falls " are as inseparable in his mind 
as they are fundamental to the origin of evil in our world. 
Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained give not the mere 
story of the exile of Adam and Eve from the happy 
garden of Eden, but a poetic and philosophical discussion 
of the nature of God, the creation of the universe and the 
mundane sphere, the origin of evil, the creation, fall, and 
restoration of mankind — the subject-matter, in fact, of all 
of Boehme's writings. In these two poems of Milton and 
in his Christian Doctrine there is presented an almost c.om-4- 
plete system of philosophical and theological truth. We 
have Milton's views on (i) God — prima materia, (2) God 
— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, (3) creation of angels, (4) 
origin of evil, (5) creation and fall of man, and (6) place 
of punishment. This is the order I shall follow in dis- 
cussing the similarity between the views of Milton and 
Boehme. 

( I ) Milton thinks of the Godhead not as a personal God 
but as an abstract Power from whom all things proceed. 
He is manifested as the eternal Will (C. D., I, p. 170), 
" the will and high permission of all- ruling Heaven " (P. 
L., I, 211). "That the will of God is the first cause of 
all things, is not intended to be denied, but his prescience 
and wisdom must not be separated from his will, much less 
considered as subsequent to the latter in point of time. The 
will of God, in fine, is not less the universal first cause, be- 
cause he has himself decreed that some things should be 
left to our own free will, than if each particular event had 
been decreed necessarily" (C. D., I, p. 39). 

The desire for self-expression resulted in the creation of 
the universe. This creation was not out of nothing (C. D., 
I, p. 179), but out of the essence of God: 



142 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

" One Almighty is, from whom 
All things proceed, and up to him return, 
If not depraved from good, created all 
To such perfection ; one first matter all, 
Endued with various forms, various degrees 
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life." 

P. L„ V, 469. 

There is no empty space, for God said 

" Boundless the deep, because I am who fill 
Infinitude; nor vacuous the space, 
Though I, uncircumscribed, myself retire, 
And put not forth my goodness, which is free 
To act or not. Necessity and Chance 
Approach not me, and what I will is Fate." 

P. L., VII, 168. 

This boundless space is called the " Abyss vast, immeasur- 
able," *' the unreal, vast, unbounded Deep." 

" The secret of the hoary Deep — a dark 
Illimitable ocean, without bound. 

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth, 
And time, and place, are lost." 

P. L., II, 891. 

The conception of the Abyss is personified, under the 
figures of " unoriginal Night and Chaos wild " : 

" Where eldest night 
And chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold 
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise 
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand." 

P. L., II, 894. 

" This wild Abyss, 
The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave. 
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, 
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed 
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight." 

P. L., II, 910. 

" The wide womb of uncreated Night, 
Devoid of sense and notion." 

F. L., II, 151. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 143 

Since Nature is created a part of God, " God and Nature 
bid the same" (F. L., VI, 174), and "God is all in all" 

(HI, 341). 

According to Boehme^ God is pure uncorporeal spirit, the ^ 

power, potentiality, and eternal foundation of all existence. 
" Men cannot say of God, that he is this or that evil or 
good, which hath distinction in itself, for he is in himself 
natureless as also afifectionless and creatureless. He hath 
no inclination to anything, for there is nothing before him 
to which he should incline, neither any evil or good. He is 
in himself the Abyss [or Chaos], without any will at all; 
in respect of nature and creature, he is as an Eternal Noth- 
ing. . . . He is the nothing and all things ; and is one only 
will, in which lieth the world and whole creation." ^ " God 
is to be considered, as to what he is, without nature and 
creature in himself, in a self-comprehensible Chaos, without 
ground, time, and place." ^ This Chaos is the Mys- 
terium Magnum, out of which light and darkness, that is 
the foundation of Heaven and Hell, is shown from eternity 
and made manifest, a chaos, because good and evil arise out 
of it, viz., " light and darkness, life and death, joy and 
grief, salvation and damnation." ^ 

(2) This eternal foundation of all being is to be under- 
stood as eternal will with a desire for self-comprehension, 
self-expression through its own existence. " The first only 
'will, without a beginning, begets in itself a comprehensible 
will which is Son to the Abyssal Will, when the nothing 
makes within itself into a something wherein the Abyss con- 

^ Election, chap, i, §§4-8. See Three Prin., chap. Iv, §§31-46, 
Myst. Magn., chap, i, § 2. 
^ Election, chap, i, § 20. 
^ Clavis, pp. 48, 50. 



144 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

ceives [forms] itself into a Byss, and the issue of the 
Abyssal Will through the conceived Son is called Spirit; 
and that which is issued is the delight wherein the Father 
ever finds and beholds Son and Spirit, and it is called God's 
Wisdom, or contemplation." ^ *' Therein lie all things as 
a divine Imagination, wherein all ideas of angels and souls 
are seen eternally in divine likeness, not as creatures, but as 
a reflection ; as when a man beholds himself in a mirror." ^ 
Boehme thus marks the division of this spirit into Father, 
Son, and Spirit,^ but as he elsewhere names them, the 
Father as wrath-fire, the Son as light of love, and the Spirit 
as the living power and virtue of both, they do not approach 
very near to the Christian conception of the Trinity. It is 
only in his relation to man as mediator and redeemer that 
Christ, Boehme's *' second principle," seems first to gain a 
distinct personality, and here he becomes a subordinate 
power, obedient to God. " Behold the innocent man Christ 
was set in our stead, in the anger of the Father; he must 
reconcile not only all that which Adam had made himself 
guilty of, by his going forth from paradise into the king- 
dom of this world, and so fell foully in the presence of God 
and was scorned of all the devils ; but he must make atone- 
ment for all that which was done afterwards and which is 
still done or will be done by us." * The Holy Spirit or third 
principle fashions the world for which the Word or second 
principle contributes the material ; the third principle comes 
to reality and activity only in the creation of the world ^ and 
is that " in which the seven properties of nature, or seven 

^Election, chap, i, §§10-17. 

^ Clavis, p. 43. 

^Myst. Magn., chap, vii, §§6-8, 9-12. 

* Three Prin., chap, xxv, § 52. 

° Three Prin., chap, ix, §§ 33, 36. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 145 

forming spirits, introduce themselves into a substance " ^ — 
that is, corporeal nature. 

While Christ is spoken of by Milton as if he were '* very 
God/' he is nevertheless not on an equality with God the 
Father; the conception of Godhead as a Triune manifes- 
tation of the same essence is not mentioned in Paradise 
Lost. In the Christian Doctrine (1, pp. 79-81) the in- 
ternal efficiency or will of God is contrasted with the " ex- 
ternal efficiency or generation whereby God, in pursuance 
of his decree, has begotten his only Son " by whom after- 
ward all other things were made in heaven and earth; the 
Father and Son are different persons. Christ had a definite 
temporal beginning, 

" Of all creation first, 
Begotten Son, divine similitude, 
In whose conspicuous countenance, without cloud 
Made visible, the Almighty Father shines. 
Whom else no creature can behold." 

P. L., Ill, 383. 
" This day have I begot whom I declare 
My only Son." 

P. L., V, 603. 

To the Son **all regal power is given" (V, 739). 
Christ's statement, /' I and my Father are one," means one, 
*' not in essence, but in love, in communion, in agreement, in 
charity, in spirit, in glory " (C D., I, p. 92). " Christ could 
never have become a mediator, nor could he have been sent 
from God, nor have been obedient to him, unless he had been 
inferior to God and the Father as to his nature " (C D., I, 
p. 114). 

The Holy Spirit is spoken of as the " Comforter who shall 
dwell within men " (P. L., XII, 498) — the Spirit of God, 
promised alike and given to all believers (P. L., XII, 519). 

^Election, chap, iv, §§ 10-19. 



146 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

It is the Holy Spirit who inspires the poet; he is the 
'' inner Hght," the Hght celestial in man. Yet he is not God ; 
for, " although the Holy Spirit be nowhere said to have 
taken upon himself any mediatorial functions, as is said of 
Christ, nor to be engaged by the obligations of a filial rela- 
tion to pay obedience to the Father, yet he must evidently 
be considered as inferior to both Father and Son, inasmuch 
as he is represented and declared to be subservient and 
obedient in all things" (C. D., I, p. 158). "He was cre- 
ated or produced by the substance of God, not by a natural 
necessity, but by the free will of the agent, probably before 
the foundations of the world were laid, but later than the 
Son and far inferior to him " (C. D., I, p. 169). 

Such, then, is the Godhead out of whom and by whom 
the universe was created. With Boehme this entire crea- 
tion depends upon the principle that '* if everything were 
only one, that one could not be revealed to itself." ^ When 
there is to be light, there must first be a fire ; fire bears the 
light and the light reveals the fire to itself.^ Thus wrath 
can become apparent only through love, and love only 
through wrath.^ So there is in God an eternal contrariety 
or opposition of forces, through the interaction of which 
" eternal nature " or the universe evolves. " All things con- 
sist in Yes or No, whether Godly, Devilish, earthly, or what- 
soever it may be called. The One, as the Yes, is pure 
power and life, and is the truth of God or God himself. But 
God would be unknowable to himself, and would have in 
himself no joy, perception, or exaltation without the No. 
The No is the opposite to the Yes or the truth. In order 
that the truth may be manifest as a Something, there must 

* 177 Theos. . Quest., p. 3, § 6. 
^Myst. Magn., chap, xl, § 3. 
^ Myst. Magn., chap, iv, § 19, chap, v, § 7, chaps, viii-x. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 147 

be a contrariety therein." ^ This our world, " with all that 
belongs to it, as well as man, is created as an out-birth, out 
of the eternal nature : and God hath created it for no other 
cause, but that he would, in his eternal wisdom, manifest 
the wonders which are in the eternal nature." ^ 

(3) The angels, according to Boehme a part of the bal- f 
ance and harmony in God, '' were created in the first princi- 
ple, and enlightened from the light of God, that they might 
increase the paradisical joy and abide therein eternally. All 
they do is an increasing of the heavenly joy, and a delight 
and pleasure to the Heart of God, a holy sport in paradise ; 
to this end God created them, that he might be manifested 
and rejoice in his creatures and the creatures in him." ^ 

The angels of Paradise Lost, 

" Sons of light, with songs 
And choral symphonies, day without night 
Circle his throne rejoicing." Y g 

" Solemn days they spend 
In song and dance about the sacred hill." y g g 

" They eat, they drink and in communion sweet 
Quaff immortality and joy." tt f- 

And ' ^^- 

" As they please 
They limb themselves and colour, shape or size 
Assume, as hkes them best, condense or rare." 

VI, 351. 
Boehme's angels are " all of them together a fitted In- 
strument of the eternal spirit of God in his joy." * Some 
angelical prince " begins in his rank or file a round, with 
his legions, with singing, sounding forth, dancing, rejoicing 
and jubilating. This is heavenly music, for here everyone 

^ 177 Theos. Quest., chap, iii, §§ 2, 4. 
^ Threefold Life, chap, iii, § 40. 
' Three Prin., chap, iv, §§65-66. 
* Election, chap, iv, § 48. 



148 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

sings according to his quality, and the king rejoices and 
jubilates with his angels, to the honor of the great God, 
and to the increasing and multiplying of the heavenly joys, 
and that is in the Heart of God as a holy sport or play." ^ 
" When the heavenly music of the angels rises up, there rise 
up all manner of figures, shapes or ideas and all manner of 
colors. The angels are of various manifold qualities and 
have several colors and beauties." ^ They are not cor- 
poreal, but of a bright clear visible substance, as if it were 
material.^ In heaven they sing the " paradisical songs of 
praise concerning the pleasant fruit in paradise which 
groweth in the divine power. Can this be no joy and re- 
joicing? And should not that be a pleasant thing, with the 
many thousand sorts of angels to eat heavenly bread, and 
to rejoice in their communion and fellowship ? " * 

(4) So far there is no evil in the universe. Both 
Boehme and Milton believe that evil is not in God and is 
not willed by God. But the visible world, evolved from 
God's eternal nature, a shadow of heaven,^ is manifestly not 
wholly good. This is due to the fall of the angel Lucifer. 
This angel, according to Boehme, was " a prince and king 
over many legions, but he became a devil and hath lost the 
beautiful, bright, and glorious image. For he, as well as 
other angels, was created out of the eternal nature, out of 
the eternal indissoluble band, and hath also stood in para- 
dise, also felt and seen the working of the holy Deity, the 
birth of the second principle (Christ),® and the confirmation 

* Aurora, chap, xii, §§ 32-33. 
^ Aurora, chap, xii, §§ 34, 60. 
^ Three Prin., chap, ix, § 18. 

* Three Prin., chap, x, §§ 15, 16. 

" P. L., V, 574-76 ; Election, chap, v, §§ 50-52. 

* In P. L., the Father announces the birth of his only Son to 
the Angels, among whom is Lucifer. V, 603. 



Similarity .'Between Milton and Boehme 149 

of the Holy Ghost ; his food should have been of the Word 
of the Lord, and therein he should have continued an angel. 
But he saw that he was a prince, standing in the first prin- 
ciple, and so despised the birth of the Heart of God (Christ), 
and the soft and very lovely influence thereof, and meant 
to be a very potent and terrible lord ; he despised the meek- 
ness of the Heart of God. He would not set his imagina- 
tion therein, and therefore he could not be fed from the 
Word of the Lord, and so his light went out, whereupon 
presently he became a loathsomeness in paradise, and was 
spewed out of his princely throne, with all his legions that 
stuck to him. He also presently lost the image of God. 
Thus all things departed from him and he remained in the 
valley of darkness. He is shut up in the fire of the first 
principle, and yet he raiseth himself up continually, thinking 
to reach the Heart of God and to domineer over it. His 
climbing up in his will is his fall and the more he climbeth 
up in his will, the greater is his fall." ^ The second prin- 
ciple is extinguished in him ; his being is out of " tempera- 
ture " or harmony. The fire and light, the wrath and love 
were balanced until Lucifer exalted self, opposed God and 
became shut up in the principle of fire-wrath. Lucifer and 
his angels had free-will before their fall ; ^ afterward they 
were obliged by their nature to do only evil.^ With this 
compare P. L., I, 159-162 : 

" But of this be sure — 
To do aught good never will be our task, 
But ever to do ill our sole delight, 
As being the contrary to His high will 
Whom we resist." 

* Three Prin., chap, iv, §§ 65-71. 
^ Threefold Life, chap, viii, § 43. 
^ Three Prin., chap, v, § 30. 



150 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

(5) This explanation of the origin of evil does not accord 
very closely with the usual orthodox Christian explanation 
which notes the fact that Eve was tempted by a fallen angel, 
but nevertheless attributes the real entrance of evil into the 
world to the fall of Adam and Eve. In Boehme's teaching 
strong emphasis is laid upon the fact that it was Lucifer's 
malice and envy that brought woe into this world. In Lu- 
cifer's fall, however, evil had not yet become an autonomous 
force. Milton and Boehme agree that God plans to make 
evil serve good, out of evil to create good.^ Hence He can 
create man in Lucifer's stead, even though foreknowing 
that Adam will fall a victim to the same self-will that 
destroyed the proud angel. " When Lucifer fell he was 
thrust out into the first principle; and then the throne in 
the second principle was empty. In the same principle 
God created man, who should continue therein, and should 
be tempted to try whether that were possible; and to that 
end it was that God created the third principle [the Holy 
Spirit], in the place of this world, that man also (in the 
fall) might not become a devil, but that he might be helped 
again. As Milton has it (the italics are mine) : 

" To him 

Glory and praise whose wisdom had ordained 
Good out of evil to create — instead 
Of spirits malign, a better race to bring 
Into their vacant room, and thence diffuse 
His good to worlds and ages infinite." 

P. L„ VII, 188. 

Compare also XII, 470. Boehme, on the other hand, says : 
" Therefore the enmity of the devil against Christ is because 
he sitteth upon his royal throne. Thus the place of this 

^ " [The apostate's] evil 
Thou usest, and from thence creat'st more good." 

P. L., VII, 615. 



Similarity ^Between Milton and Boehme 151 

world is the throne and body of our Christ; and all is his 
own also ; and the devil is our Christ's captive." ^ " For 
the kingdom of darkness must also have creatures. They 
are all profitable and useful to God." ^ 

Boehme's Satan, ''as he is called in heaven," hated man 
as well as Christ ; having himself been a prince and hierarch 
and cast out for his pride, he envied man the glory of being 
created in and for the spiritual world, the place which he 
himself once possessed.^ Milton's Lucifer exclaims 

" Behold instead 
Of us outcast, his new delight, 
Mankind created, and for him this world." 

P. L., IV, 105. 
He was 

"With envy seized 
At sight of all this world beheld so fair." 

111,552. 

" Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face 
Thrice changed with pale ire, envy and despair." 

IV, 113.' 

The clear-cut and distinct individuality of Milton's Satan 
that has led to the assertion that he is the hero of Para-' 
dise Lost is likewise characteristic of Boehme's Satan. The 
archangel Michael thus addresses Milton's Satan at the time 
of the war in heaven : 

"How hast thou instilled 
Thy malice into thousands, once upright 
And faithful, now proved false ! But think not here 
To trouble holy rest ; Heaven casts thee out 
From her confines ; Heaven, the seat of bliss, 

^ Three Prin., chap, xxv, §§ 103-4. 
^ Election, chap, viii, § 176. 

^Regeneration, chap, ii, §46. Also Myst. Magn., chap, xv, §19; 
chap, xvii, §31. 
* See also P. L., I, 34; VI, 898. 



152 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Brooks not the works of violence and war. 
Hence, then, and evil go with thee along, 
Thy offspring, to the place of evil, Hell, — 
Thou and thy wicked crew ! " 

P. L., VI, 269-77. 

With this compare Boehme's words to Satan (Four Com- 
plexions, chap, iii, p. 63) : " Whence comest thou, thou 
black wretch ? I thought thou hadst been in heaven, among 
the angels; how comest thou to be expelled from thence, 
and loaded with the register or catalogue of God's anger? 
I thought thou hadst been a prince in God; how art thou 
then become his executioner? Is so fair an angel become 
a base executioner? Fye upon thee; what hast thou to do 
with me? Away to the angels in Heaven, if thou art 
God's servant. Fye on thee, avaunt hence, thou servile 
executioner of God's wrath: Go to thine own angels; thou 
hast nothing to do here." ^ 

A study of the means used by Satan in bringing about 
the downfall of his hated successors reveals another of 
Boehme's fundamental conceptions. The imagination plays 
a great role in his thought. It is the power or faculty 

* This same comparison I found in the course of my study on 
this subject in a work by Julius Otto Opel (1864) on Valentin 
Weigel, the mystic whose works Boehme read. With no idea of 
the spread of Boehme's works in England or of the historical 
connection between the two men (Boehme and Milton), Opel 
makes the following striking statement in a note, p. 239: "Only 
Milton is to be compared with Boehme. Klopstock, in spite of his 
Messias, was of an entirely different nature. Boehme is a religious 
and political Puritan, even though his political inclinations are less 
apparent. It would give me great pleasure to compare the two 
writers, particularly from the aspect of their religious-philosophical 
views. Whole songs from Milton's Paradise Lost seem to find 
expression in Boehme's poetic prose. An assumption that Milton 
knew Boehme's writings, or at least similar tracts of German en- 
thusiasts, must be given due consideration, although, so far as I 
know, it has not been brought forward." 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 153 

through which the will, accompanied by strong desire, ef- 
fects any creation or change. " We apprehend the divine 
essence through the imagination." ^ '^ Sin maketh not 
itself but the will maketh it; it cometh from the imagina- 
tion into the spirit." ^ Lucifer's own fall was brought 
about by his imagination when he set his will and desire 
toward increasing his own importance.^ In like manner 
Adam's imagination brought him into sin.* Similarly Mil- 
ton says : 

"The first sort by their own suggestion fell, 
Self-tempted, self-depraved; man falls deceived 
By the other first; man therefore shall find grace, 
The other, none." 

P. L., Ill, 129. 

Satan first attempts to poison Eve's imagination through, 
a dream: 

" Him there they found 
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve, 
Assaying by his devilish art to reach 
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge 
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams. 
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint 
The animal spirits, . . . thence raise . . . 
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires." 

P. L., IV, 799. 

poehme says that man " is often like a toad, whose mind 
is so very venomous, that it poisoneth a tender or weak 
mind to the temporal death by its imagination. '* ^ 

According to Boehme's account Adam and Eve were 
tainted in their imagination before the actual sin of eating 

^Incarnation, pt. i, chap, vi, § 14; Epistle V, §§ 10, 13. 
^ Forty Quest., no. 15, §4. 
^Incarnation, pt. i, chap, ii, §28. 
* Same, pt. i, chap, iv, § 60. 
® Three Prin., chap, xvi, § 21. 



154 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

the apple. At least a hint of this seems expressed in 
Adam's half-fatherly, half-scholastic discourse to Eve upon 
her dream ; he has already a theoretical knowledge of evil : 

" Best image of myself, and dearer half, 
The trouble of thy thoughts this night in sleep 
Affects me equally; nor can I like 
This uncouth dream — of evil sprung, I fear ; 
Yet evil whence? In thee can harbour none. 
Created pure. But know that in the soul 
Are many lesser faculties, that serve 
Reason as chief. Among these Fancy next 
Her office holds ; of all external things 
Which the five watchful senses represent 
She forms imaginations, aery shapes 
Which Reason, joining or disjoining, frames 
All what we affirm or what deny, and call 
Our knowledge or opinion. . . . Yet be not sad; 
Evil into the mind of God or man 
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave 
No blot or blame behind." 

P. L., V, 95. 

Satan's second and successful attempt to gain control of 
Eve through her imagination takes place when he assumes 
the form of a serpent ; he repeats the flattering words that 
he caused her to dream (V, 78) and tells her that she should 
** be seen a Goddess among Gods " (IX, 547). 

" These, these and many more 
Causes import your need of this fair fruit. 
Goddess humane, reach, then, and freely taste. 

" He ended ; and his words, replete with guile, 
Into her heart too easy entrance won. 
Fixed on the fruit she gazed ; which to behold 
Might tempt alone ; and in her ears the sound 
Yet rung of his persuasive words, impregned 
With reason, to her seeming, and with truth." 

P. L., IX, 730-38. 

Boehme tells the same story in fewer words: "For the 
devil said the fruit would not hurt, but the eyes of her 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 155 

sharp understanding would be opened, and they should 
be as God; this Eve liked very well, that she should be a 
Goddess and wholly consented thereto ; and in this full con- 
sent she fell from the divine harmony." ^ 

The various results of man's fall are similarly treated by 
Boehme and Milton. Whereas before there has been " eter- 
nal Spring " (P. L., IV, 268 ; X, 679) and " Spring and 
Autumn together hand in hand " (V, 394) now '* the air 
must suffer change" (X, 212). 

" The sun 
Had first his precept so to move, so shine, 
As might affect the earth with cold and heat 
Scarce tolerable; and from the north to call 
Decrepit winter; from the south to bring 
Solstitial summer's heat." 

X, 651.' 

Boehme says that " no heat nor cold had touched them if 
Adam had not fallen ; there had also no winter been mani- 
fest upon the earth, for in paradise there was an equal tem- 
perature." ^ But they fell, and heat and cold seized upon 
them.* The fall " caused the earth to tremble, whereby 
the earth trembled also in the death of Christ and the 
rocks cleaved in sunder." ^ " And here the Heaven in man 
trembled for horror; as the earth quaked in wrath when 
his anger was destroyed on the cross by the sweet love of 
God." ^ In Paradise Lost, 

* Myst. Magn., chap, xx, § 25. 

' See also P. L., X, 687, 1056. 

• Myst. Magn., chap, xviii, § 13. 

* Epistle X, p. 9 ; Regeneration, chap, ii, § 61 ; chap, iii, § 68 ; 
Incarnation, pt. i, chap, ii, § 53. 

' Threefold Life, chap, xiv, § 46 ; Three Prin., chap, xv, § 26 ; 
P. L., X, 660; IV, 671. 

• Three Prin., chap, iv, § 28. 



156 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

" So saying, her rash hand in evil hour 
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate. 
Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat 
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe, 
That all was lost." 

P. L, IX, 780. 

"Earth trembled from her entrails as again 
In pangs, and nature gave a second groan ; 
Sky low'red ; and muttering thunder some sad drops 
Wept, at completing of the mortal sin 
Original." 

IX, 1000. 

Still further beliefs regarding the nature of mankind are 
similar. Both writers had faith in decided influence of the 
stars upon all life : ^ Boehme affirms that " the stars or con- 
stellations operate in man, and afiford him the senses " ; ^ 
Milton speaks of the " sweet influence of the Pleiades " 
(P. L., VII, 374) and the "happy constellations" (VIII, 
512). Boehme personifies the divine element in humanity 
as the " divine virgin of wisdom," who controls all inspira- 
tion and knowledge of God in the human heart.^ In his 
invocation of the Holy Spirit as his Muse, Milton repre- 
sents the Holy Spirit as conversing with Eternal Wisdom: 

" Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name 
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine 
Following, above the Olympian hill I soar, 
Above the flight of Pegasean wing! 
The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou 
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top 
Of old Olympus dwellst; but heaven-born, 
Before the hills appeared or fountain flowed, 
Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst converse, 

^Threefold Life, chap, v, §§41-45; chap, vi, §78; Three Prin., 
chap, xiv, §§ 12, 85-87. 
' Myst. Magn., chap, xxiii, § 3. 
• Regeneration, chap, iii, § 69. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 157 

Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play 
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased 
With thy celestial song." 

P. L, VII, 1-12. 

(6) The exultation of the devil over man*s fall (P. L., X, 
460-67, Three Prin., chap, xvii, § 63) and Satan's shame 
at his own fall (P. L., IV, 42-45; IX, 163-167; Election, 
chap, iv, §§ 117-119) do not make hell any more pleasant, 
although the fire is " immaterial and eternal," ^ and can- 
not consume the " imperishable heavenly essences " ^ of 
Satan's angels, fallen though they are. The fallen angels 
must dwell on in " darkness visible." ^ 

" Void of light 
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames 
Casts pale and dreadful " ; * 

or, according to Boehme, in " darkness absolute, their light 
only what shineth from their fiery eyes, like the glimmering 
of a flash of fire." ^ Boehme's Satan does not beat and tor- 
ment his children, as some teach, but " they must do his 
will, and the anguish and horror of hell plague every one 
of them sufficiently in their own abominations." ^ These 
children of Satan " lost their beauteous form and image and 
became like serpents, dragons, worms, and evil beasts," as 
soon as the divine light was completely extinguished in 
them.'' Milton's Satan and his angels became on a sudden 
a crowd of hissing snakes, after the temptation and fall of 
the happy pair had been accomplished.^ 

* Three Prin., chap, x, § 47. 

'P.L.,1, 138; 11,99. 

'P.L.,1,63. 

*P. L., I, 180. 

sporty Quest., no. 34, §1. 

'Same, no. 18, § 25. 

'' Three Prin., chap, iv, § 64. 

'P. L., X, 508-20. 



158 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

In spite of the poetic necessity of giving hell a definite 
location in space, Milton agrees with Boehme that " heaven 
and hell are within man." *' There is nothing that is nearer 
you," says Boehme, " than heaven and hell." ^ He tells us 
that " if we will speak of our native country and tell of the 
resting-place of the souls, we need not cast our minds afar 
off; for far off and near is all one and the same thing with 
God ; heaven and hell are everywhere all over in this world. 
Therefore the soul needeth not to go far ; for at that place 
where the body dieth, there is heaven and hell." ^ God did 
not create a peculiar hell and place of torment, on purpose 
to plague the creatures, because he is not a God that wills 
evil. To turn away from God is to be in hell.^ Milton as- 
serts that 

"The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." 

P. L., I, 254. 
"Within him Hell 
He brings, and roundabout him, nor from Hell 
One step nor more than from himself can fly 
By change of place." 



" Then wilt thou not be loth 
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess 
A Paradise within thee, happier far." 



IV, 19. 



XII, 58s. 

The name Paradise Regained has caused some diffi- 
culty to commentators. It has seemed odd to them that 
Milton should impute the recovery of Paradise to the short 
scene of our Saviour's life upon earth, and not rather extend 
it to His agony and crucifixion. The reason suggested is 
that " Paradise regained by our Saviour's resisting the 

^ Three Prin., chap, ix, § 27. 

^ Three Prin,, chap, xix, §§ 62-67. 

^Threefold Life, chap, ii, §§53, 54. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 159 

temptation of Satan might be a better contrast to Paradise 
lost by our first parents too easily yielding to the same 
seductive spirit." ^ If the poetic plan of the two poems de- 
manded, as some critics suggest, that the principle of evil 
which had been victorious in the first part should he over- 
come in the second, and that this be accomplished by the 
symbolic story of Christ's temptation, such a plan would 
nevertheless not be in harmony with the Christian doctrine, 
which places all emphasis upon the sacrificial aspect of 
Christ's death. This very point — Christ's salvation of man 
by overcoming temptation — Boehme makes most impres- 
sive ; the conquest of the principle of evil is through temp- 
tation withstood. He calls the exposition of the new re- 
generation in Christ the " fairest gate or entrance of under- 
standing [the most important spiritual truth] in the book " 
of the Three Principles.^ A chapter is given here likewise 
to the Passion and Death of Christ, the only occurrence in 
Boehme's writings of such a discussion ; in the other works 
the incarnation and birth of Christ and his temptation seem 
to be the important features. In the Signatura Rerum alone 
is the fact of Christ's death emphasized. It is true that the 
statement is made there and elsewhere that Christ's resist- 
ance to temptation was not sufficient for the full regenera- 
tion of mankind ; nevertheless Boehme makes this resistance 
to temptation the determining fact. The scenes of the 
temptation, as Boehme relates them in his analysis, are the 
scenes represented in Paradise Regained. " That the Per- 
son of Christ, with his deeds and essence, might be rightly 
demonstrated to the reader, that he might apprehend it 
aright, I will therefore direct him to the temptation of Christ 
in the wilderness after his baptism. . . . Thou shouldest 

^ Masson : Poetical Works of Milton, p. 286. 
" Three Prin., chap, xxii, § 24. 



i6o Milton and Jakob Boehme 

open thine eyes," Boehme continues, '* and not speak like the 
spirit in Babel, which saith, We know not what his tempta- 
tion was. Besides, they forbid him that hath eyes to see, 
none must search into it; if they do they are called en- 
thusiasts and are cried out upon for novelists, such as 
broach new opinion and pretend to new lights, and for 
heretics. That temptation in the hard combat of Adam in 
the Garden of Eden, which Adam could not hold out in, 
here the worthy Champion went through with, and hath 
obtained victory, in his humanity in heaven, and over this 
world. Christ was set against the kingdom of the fierce 
wrath, to see whether this second Adam could stand, and 
set his imagination upon God and eat of the Word of the 
Lord. And there it was tried whether the soul would 
press into God or into the spirit of this world again. The 
earthly body must be hungry, that the soul might be rightly 
tempted. Christ rejected the earthly body and life and put 
his imagination into the Word of God, and then the soul 
in the kingdom of heaven was predominant, and the earthly 
body was as it were dead for the kingdom of heaven's 
sake. Then the devil lost his right in the soul; yet he said 
in himself. Thou hast a right in the earthly body." There- 
fore he tried the other two temptations, also without avail. 
For when " Christ had overcome in all the temptations, then 
he had wholly overcome till the last victory in death." ^ 

" Hail, Son of the Most High, heir of both Worlds, 
Queller of Satan ! On thy glorious work 
Now enter, and begin to save mankind." 

P. L., IV, 632-35. 

Thus Milton ends his story, at nearly the close of Para- 
dise Regained. There is no other source than Boehme from 

^ Three Prin., chap, xxii, §§ 78-100. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme i6i 

which he could have obtained this idea of the temptation. 
The coincidence is too strong to be merely accidental. 

The question of the incompleteness of the poem has also 
been treated by various critics, in spite of the fact that there 
are no grounds for supposing that it was left unfinished; 
Milton published it himself and resented any suggestion that 
it was inferior to its great predecessor. However, if 
Paradise Regained is considered from the viewpoint of 
being a direct sequel to Paradise Lost and consequently 
the conclusive and final poetic expression of Milton's inter- 
est in Boehme's religious-philosophical teaching, this ques- 
tion represents no problem whatever. Boehme*s plan 
of the universe included the restoration with the fall of 
man; the origin of evil presupposed the way back to good. 
In God all forces are in harmony ; in evil some force be- 
comes too strong and the harmony is destroyed. But 
only in Satan does this too-strong force absolutely crowd 
out its natural restraining opposites. In man some good 
is still present and may be brought to control. Para- 
dise is for Boehme not so much a place as a condition, 
a state of mind and heart. The second of Milton's poems 
dealing with this condition of mind and heart represents 
the process by which mankind is brought back to his original 
state. The process is again one of temptation, as in the 
case of the fall of man; Christ becomes the Redeemer be- 
cause in him the inheritance of every human heart, the 
" virgin of wisdom," comes to its own again. The line of 
" inner light," of direct communication with the origin of 
life, is re-established. 

In giving to his second poem the name Paradise Re- 
gained Milton brings out this deeper meaning of the word 
paradise, the heaven within man. Thus Milton's conception 
of paradise is not a place where one's dreams come true, 




i62 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

but a state, within the reach of humanity, in which man is 
truly the measure of all things of heaven and of earth. 
What man brings to his knowledge of the world is fully 
equal to what his senses give him. We seem to feel in this 
conception of paradise the foreshadowing of a deep philo- 
sophical system. In spite of Boehme's ardent piety and in- 
wardness of religion, his interpretation of life was a depar- 
ture from the orthodox belief in man as an essentially sin- 
ful creature whose existence here is but a preparation for 
real living hereafter. This departure from orthodoxy was 
felt by Boehme's contemporaries, who stubbornly opposed 
him whether they made any efforts really to understand his 
teachings or not. 

The final similarity between Paradise Regained and 
oehme*s teachings is to be found in the delineation of the 
character of Christ. The objection has been made that Mil- 
ton represents Christ In this poem as essentially human ; that 
he utterly loses sight of Christ's divine nature.^ Boehme's 
Christ, the second Adam, was like Adam before the fall, a 
perfect being ; he was not a human being as we are human, 
because we are not born perfect, but he was also not yet 
divine, for he was the son of God only in so far as Adam 
was a son of God.^ After the temptation Christ became 
entirely divine ; then the virgin of divine wisdom (the divine 
element in man) espoused the soul of Christ in the Trinity.^ 
This idea of Christ as the second Adam is biblical, of course, 
but it was first definitely used as a principle of theological 
dogma by Schleiermacher. 

The formulation of a " body of divinity " had been one 
of Milton's plans several years before he became secretary 

^Todd, p. 323. 

* Three Prin., chap, xxii, §§ 26-27. 

^ Three Prin., chap, xxii, § 96. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 163 

of the Commonwealth. Part of the task assigned his pupils 
at this time had , consisted in writing dictations, suitable for 
this purpose/ from the works of various theologians. The 
Christian Doctrine is the final outcome of this plan, and is 
the work of Milton's maturest, possibly his last years.^ The 
result, however, seems notably different from the original 
plan, since the Christian Doctrine is based, not upon the 
theology of contemporary or ancient writers, but upon the 
Scriptures alone. It represents one of the very first at- 
tempts toward a strictly biblical theology and is the more 
remarkable in a period in which exegetical studies had al- 
most disappeared from the universities and scholasticism 
sought only the traditional authorities of dogma.^ Equally 
remarkable is the fact that this work treats not only of 
dogma but of ethics, which the theologians of the reformed 
church of the seventeenth century almost entirely neglected. 
The ethical teachings and their character of practical rules 
for everyday life gave to Boehme's writings part of their 
great popularity. Again and again he insists that " God 
will require an account of all our doings and how we have 
kept house with his works."* Boehme's only authority is 
the Bible ; he read the works of various men, he tells us, but 
received from them no help in determining our attitude 
toward the moral obligations of life. In his Christian Doc- 
trine Milton's only authority is the Bible. In the dedication 
he defends himself against the charge of heresy in inter- 
preting the Scriptures for himself. "It is only to the in- 
dividual faith of each that the Deity has opened the way of 
eternal salvation and he requires that he who would be 

^ Stern, II, p. 398. 

^ Stern, IV, p. 147. 

^ Weingarten, p. 81. 

* Three Prin., Preface, § 6. 



164 Milton and Jakob Boehme . 

saved should have a personal belief of his own" (C. D., 
dedication, p. 2). The w^hole v^ork seems in reality a de- 
fense of his attitude toward liberty and toleration and per- 
haps also of the religious views expressed in Paradise Lost 
and Paradise Regained, with which there is perfect agree- 
ment. 

So much for the similarity in religious and philosophical 
views between Milton and Boehme. It is to be noted also 
that there is the same striking similarity in their utterances 
regarding the political realm, centering about the prin- 
ciple of freedom of conscience. 

" A true judge," according to Boehme, " is God's steward 
in the kingdom of this world ; and that it might not be need- 
ful that God should always pour forth his wrath upon the 
people, therefore he hath put the sword into their hands to 
protect and defend the righteous, and to punish the evil. 
But if he turneth tyrant, and doth nothing but devour the 
bread of his subjects, and only adorneth his state and 
dignity in pride, to the oppression of the needy, and will not 
hear the oppressed, then he is an insulting, tormenting 
prince and ruler in the kingdom of Antichrist." ^ " Kings 
and princes shall be constrained to give an account of their 
subjects; how they have ruled and protected them; what 
kind of government they have used ; why they have taken 
away the lives of many by tyranny; also why they have 
made war for their covetousness, and their pleasure's sake." ^ 
Milton may be thinking of Boehme's " true judge " when he 
says to Satan: 

"Unjustly thou deprav'st it with the name 
Of servitude, to serve whom God ordains, 
Or Nature; God and Nature bid the same, 

* Three Prin., chap, xxi, §§ 43-44. See also chap, xxi, §§ 32-33. 
^ Forty Quest., no. 30, § 74. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 165 

When he who rules is worthiest, and excels 
Them whom he governs." 

P. L., VI, 174-78. 

Michael discourses with Adam concerning tyranny : 

" Yet know withal 
Since thy original lapse, true liberty 
Is lost, which always with right reason dwells 
Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being. 
Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed, 
Immediately inordinate desires 
And upstart passions catch the government 
From Reason, and to servitude reduce 
Man, till then free. Therefore, since he permits 
Within himself unworthy powers to reign, 
Over free reason, God, in judgment just, 
Subjects him from without to violent lords 
Who oft as undeservedly enthral 
His outward freedom. Tyranny must be, 
Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse." 

P. L., XII, 82-96. 
Milton was 

" not sedulous by nature to indite 
Wars, hitherto the only argument 
Heroic deemed." 

P. L., IX, 27. 

*' O shame to men ! Devil with devil damned 
Firm concert hold ; men only disagree 
Of creatures rational, though under hope 
Of heavenly grace, and, God proclaiming peace, 
Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife 
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars 
Wasting the earth, each other to destroy." 

IX, 496-502. 

Boehme*s opposition to war is even more outspoken, 
though he likewise permits self-defense. ** When any fall 
to firing, killing with the sword, to undo people, ruin 
towns and countries, there is no Christ, but the anger of 
the Father, and it is the devil that bloweth the fire." ^ " He 

^ Three Prin., chap, xxvi, § 16. 



i66 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

that causeth and beginneth a war he is the devil's officer;" 
but " he that defendeth himself against his enemy, upon 
necessity, without any other intent or desire, is not against 
God." ^ 

The opposition to a state church arises from the belief in 
inspiration and dependence upon the " inner light." '' It be- 
came a custom," Boehme relates, " that every one was 
bound to come to the temple made of stones, and the 
Temple of God in Christ stood and stands very empty ; — but 
when they saw the desolation in the disputations, they 
called councils, and made laws and canons which every 
one must observe upon pain of death. Thus the Temple of 
Christ was turned into temples made of stone, and out of the 
testimony of the Holy Ghost a worldly law was made. 
Then the Holy Ghost spake no more freely, but he must 
speak according to their laws; if any came that was born 
of God and taught by the Holy Ghost, and was not con- 
formable to their laws, he must be a heretic." ^ A hired 
clergy is too apt to serve for mammon's sake, not from the 
impulse of the light within, for 

" he who receives 
Light from above, from the foundation of light, 
No other doctrine needs, though granted true." 

P. L., IV, 288. 

This results in a degenerate, worldly church. 

" Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves, 
Who all the sacred mysteries of heaven 
To their own vile advantages shall turn 
Of lucre and ambition, and the truth 
With superstitions and traditions taint, 
Left only in those written records pure, 
Though not but by the spirit understood." 

P. L., XII, 508-14. 

^ Threefold Life, chap, xii, §§ 42-43. 
^ Three Prin., chap, xxvi, § 27. 



Similarity .Between Milton and Boehme 167 

Boehme calls an uninspired pastor a thief. The con- 
straint of certain set forms of worship is death to the 
spirit. Prayers especially must not be prescribed and unin- 
spired, but spontaneous and free, as when Adam and Eve 
in the garden of Eden adore the God that made them.^ 
Even sacraments are not indispensable.^ The holy man 
holds no strife about religion; his church is in himself; he 
can dwell in the midst of sects and appear in their services 
without being bound or attached to any. He has but one 
knowledge and that is Christ in him.^ Milton speaks the 
last word concerning the state church when he says that 
external force may never be employed in the administra- 
tion of the kingdom of Christ which is the church.* 

Coming from the same source as the opposition to a hire- 
ling clergy is the seemingly unrelated dislike of a learned 
or professional clergy. Both writers agree in the statement 
that the universities cannot make ministers of God.'^ Learn- 
ing is opposed to the " inner light " because inspiration can 
never be a product of reason. It is interesting to note how 
little Milton is influenced by the philosophy of his famous 
contemporary Descartes. The Cartesian philosophy which 
needs the " natural light " to prove the fundamental assump- 
tions of its rationalism is nevertheless a philosophy of rea- 
son; Milton considers reason the supreme faculty, yet he 
subordinates to the guidance of the '' inner light " that most 
essential part of man, his intellectual life. Animals are not 
for Boehme and Milton the automata of the seventeenth- 
century philosophers, but creatures endowed with reason.^ 

'P. L., IV, 724-735; V, 153-208. 

^C.D., I, p. 417. 

^Regeneration, chap, vi, §§7, 151-163. 

* C. D., I, p. 303. 

° Threefold Life, chap, xv, §§ 9-10 ; C. D., I, p. 435. 

"P. L., IX, 558-59; Three Prin., chaps, xvi-xxix. 



i68 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

The virtue, civic as well as religious, upon which both 
Milton and Boehme lay most stress is that of " brotherly 
love." The true worship of God consists chiefly in the 
performance of good works ; ^ these include, with the ob- 
servance of inner devotion and church rites, the duties of 
man to his neighbor. " Brotherly or Christian love is the 
strongest of all affections," ^ Milton asserts, and '' friendship 
even takes precedence of all degrees of relationship." ^ " All 
is God's," says Boehme, " thou art a servant, and shouldst 
walk in love and humility towards God, and thy brother ; for 
thy brother's soul is a fellow-member with thy soul, thy 
brother's joy in heaven with God is also thy joy, his wonders 
are also thy wonders." * " In all selfhood or own pro- 
priety there is a false plant ; one brother should be the sover- 
eign cure and refreshment to another, and delight and con- 
tent his mind with the insemination of his love-will. There 
were enough in this world, if covetousness drew it not into a 
selfish propriety, and would bear good will to his brother as 
himself, and let his pride go, which is from the devil."" ^ Mil- 
ton maintains that this love should be extended as toleration 
to all who think differently in matters of religion.^ Salva- 
tion is not open to the Christian merely, but to the heathen 
and the Turk as well. Boehme says : *' If a Turk seek God 
with earnestness, though he walk in blindness, yet he is of 
the number of those that are children without understand- 
ing ; and he reacheth to God with the children which do not 

^ C. D., II, p. I. Compare Boehme {Incarnation, chap, vi, 
§ 80) : " God needs no service or ministry : we should serve and 
minister one to another and love one another and give thanks to 
the great God." 

'C. a, II, p. 105 

' C. D., II, p. 106. 

* Forty Quest., no. 12, § 39. 

° Myst. Magn., chap, xxiv, § 21. 

"C. D., I, p. 444; II, p. 105. 



Similarity Between Milton and Boehme 169 

yet know what they speak : for it lieth not in the knowing, 
but in the will/' ^ In perfect accord with this teaching of 
Boehme, Milton says : " All have not known Christ. We 
ought to believe that the perfect sacrifice of Christ may be 
abundantly sufficient, even for those who have never heard 
the name of Christ and who believe only in God." ^ Woman 
also comes in for a generous share of toleration. Boehme 
and Milton agree perfectly regarding her inferiority; the 
two are equally generous to her. 

The belief in predestination favors the idea of a state 
church; the elect should have the government in their 
hands, to be able to determine the lives of those who are 
less favored by Divine Providence. Milton's opposition to 
this belief began, as we have seen, with the struggle of 
independency against Presbyterianism. The Christian 
Doctrine expresses his final views : " there is no particu- 
lar predestination or election but only in general, or in 
other words, the privilege belongs to all who heartily believe 
and continue in their belief." This is fully in accord with 
Boehme's views and may have been one of the very things 
to attract Milton to his writings. The book on the Election 
of Grace, Boehme's strongest expression against predesti- 
nation, was published in England in 1655. 

* Threefold Life, chap, vi, § 21. 
^C.D, I, p. 49. 



CHAPTER VI 
ROMANTICISM 

We are not accustomed to think of Coleridge as pre-emi- 
nently an exponent of mysticism. Yet it is a fact that his 
attitude of mind and the main lines of his philosophy were 
clearly mystical. From early years, as Lamb tells us, Cole- 
ridge was steeped in the writings of the Neoplatonists. 
He even expresses a decided indebtedness to the works of 
the mystics, of Jakob Boehme in particular, one of the 
four *' Great Men unjustly branded," whose vindication 
he planned sometime to write. Their works, he asserts, 
" acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from 
being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic 
system. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the 
head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working 
presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective 
faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs 
and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be pro- 
pelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they 
were to afford my soul either food or shelter." ^ 

In this confession of Coleridge there are expressed some 
of the essential elements of romanticism, particularly the in- 
sistence upon the feeling rather than the reason as the chief 
faculty of the poet. We shall not go amiss in assuming that 
the effect which Boehme had upon Milton was similar to his 
effect upon Coleridge and that for this reason Milton is to be 

* Coleridge : Biographia Literaria, New York, 1882, p. 262. 

170 



Romanticism 171 

considered the forerunner, if not the actual beginner, of the 
romantic movement in English literature. 

Critics and early interpreters of Milton seem to have been 
convinced — unconsciously perhaps — that some decidedly 
new element had appeared in his works. The eighteenth 
century opens with the critical writings of John Dennis 
(1657-1734). His point of view is interesting by reason of 
its manner of connecting Milton with the history of roman^ 
ticism. Through Dennis the study of Milton became re- 
lated to that quarrel between the ancients and the moderns 
in France, which constitutes, throughout the eighteenth cen- 
tury, a kind of prologue to the history of the idea of hu- 
man progress — an idea playing an important part in the 
thought of that period. Dennis wanted a reformation of 
poetry. He maintained that poetry of a truly high order 
must spring from passion, and that right here the true refor- 
mation must begin. For him, passion meant, as for most 
writers of the eighteenth century, " exalted feeling." The 
deepest and loftiest passions are connected with religious 
feelings and a sacred theme. He distinguishes between 
" Greater poetry and Less." Milton's works, especially 
those dealing with religious themes, belong to the nobler 
order; Paradise Lost is the greatest poem ever written by 
man because it is based upon imagination and enthusiastic 
passion. Poetry, in fact, a product of the feelings rather 
than of the intellect, " seems to be a noble attempt of nature, 
by which it endeavors to exalt itself to its happy primitive 
state ; and he who is entertained with the accomplish'd Poem, 
is for a time at least restor'd to Paradise." ^ 

The next great critic to concern himself with Milton was 
Addison (1672-1719), who began publishing the Paradise 

* Dennis: The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, 
1701, p. 172. See also The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704. 



172 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Lost papers in the Spectator because the poem was even 
then sufficiently well known to arouse further interest among 
the readers of the periodical. At the outset Addison as- 
sumes for Milton " the first place among our English poets." 
Though criticising him partly according to classic standards 
by comparing him with Homer and Vergil, like Dennis, Ad- 
dison emphasizes the necessity of passion, and glorifies Mil- 
ton as the one who has made the miraculous possible in the 
modern world. 

If we are to try to analyze the spell that made the earlier 
half of the eighteenth century go Milton-mad, over Para- 
dise Lost, and the second half of the century equally mad 
over Milton's minor poems, we must look at these works as 
a vindication of imagination over reason as the creative and 
motive force in poetry. This was part of Milton's legacy 
from Boehme, the one great mystic whom he knew ; through 
Milton this legacy was passed on to those who followed in 
his footsteps. 

The connection between mysticism and romanticism 
should not be difficult to find. The fresh current — loosely 
called romanticism — that swept through the literature of 
Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century gives 
us a term that must be interpreted with extreme care. We 
must find some central thought, some common point of de- 
parture, for the tendencies we meet, tendencies so distinct, 
so conflicting, yet in the end often so closely connected, 
as the reawakening of religion and the revival of humor; 
the return toward the medieval past, and, at the same time, 
the return toward the ideals of Greek poetry and the sim- 
plicity of Greek imagination; the renewed love of external 
nature and the growing sense of a living bond between it 
and man, and the craving for the unrelated, the remote, and 
the supernatural ; the cry for free development and dominion 



Romanticism 173 

of the individual, and the cry of emotion and of a " return 
to nature." Starting from the bare reaction against the 
purely intellectual outlook of the Augustan age, the germ 
of the whole movement is to be found in the revolt of the 
emotions against the tyranny of the intellect. This is also 
the attitude of the mystic with his demand for individual 
freedom of utterance and of experience based on the emo- 
tional, the inner, rather than the '' common sense " life. In 
the writings of many of the romanticists of England, France, 
and Germany there is a strong vein of mysticism, of the 
feeling of the indissoluble unity of life, of the alikeness in 
all things, and many of these men were, like Milton, in some 
way influenced by Boehme. 

The strong reaction against the intellectual view of poetry, 
a reaction which caused the pendulum to swing too far in 
the direction of emotion, was first expressed in England in 
the works of Thomson and Young. Both these men were, 
in their way of imagining and in their emphasis of the 
imagination, under the influence of the great pioneer Milton. 
To Paradise Lost was due, to an extent not yet fully real- 
ized, the change which came over European ideas in the 
eighteenth century with regard to the nature and scope of 
epic poetry. That work was the mainstay of those ad- 
venturous critics who dared to maintain, in the face of 
French classicism, the supreme rights of creative imagina- 
tion over reason. Milton's influence on the German litera- 
ture of the eighteenth century was hardly inferior to Shak- 
spere's; Milton's name was a by-word in the controversy 
that brought about the first great progress of German 
poetry. He cast an equally strong spell over the pioneers 
of French romanticism, particularly in the first thirty years 
of the nineteenth century, moulding those who prepared 
the French mind for romanticism. 



174 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

From the Middle Ages down to the beginnings of the 
romantic school in Germany the classic inheritance of the 
epic spirit survived. To Milton as to other poets came the 
conscious desire to produce a national epic. But the seven- 
teenth century was no time for the production of an epic. 
The powerful opposition of church and state in their con- 
scious struggles for supremacy produced an atmosphere far 
removed from the simplicity and immediacy of feel- 
ing in which epic poetry arises. Milton's was the first and 
greatest of many such attempts in England, France, and 
Germany, but the time of the true epic had passed. Milton, 
however, was the poet who solved the epic problem as well 
as it could be solved and that was along romantic lines. The 
interest in the childhood of the race is not classic. The be- 
lief that the primitive conditions of the race as depicted in 
the Greek and Roman heroes were better than existing 
conditions is a result of the romantic spirit. The discovery 
of new countries and new peoples had wrought mightily 
in the hearts of nations wearied with culture and worn with 
life ; these nations wanted to find the original primitive hu- 
man race, that from it they might gain a new lease on life. 
Paradise Lost is part of this romantic longing for the origi- 
nal, the real man, unspoiled by court and king. This desire 
to return to the ideal conditions of the early life of mankind 
is one of the fundamental causes of the Utopian literature 
prevalent at this time, and one of the secrets of its great 
popularity. Paradise Lost pictures Utopia, in a certain 
sense; not the ideal society to which man is progressing, it 
is true, but the ideal state from which he came and which he 
has the power to revive within himself if he but will. The 
belief of Milton's time in the expected millennium had kept 
the idea of paradise ever before men's minds, until regain- 



Romanticism 175 

ing paradise was the most natural thought in the world to 
them. 

It would be both interesting and instructive if we might 
at this point compare Boehme's influence at the close of the 
eighteenth century upon the romantic school in Germany 
with his influence upon the English mind and character 
from the time of Milton through the period of English 
romanticism. We should have to compare Goethe, Jung- 
Stilling, Tieck, Novalis, Fouque, Jean Paul, the Schlegels, 
Schopenhauer, Hegel, Schelling, Franz von Baader, with 
Milton, William Law and his follower John Byrom, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, William Blake, Carlyle. Coleridge aAd 
Blake, men of sympathetic minds, with similar philosophies 
of life, who might have been close friends if they had en- 
joyed more than their one chance meeting,^ both express 
their allegiance to Boehme. Wordsworth, whose mysticism 
is the Neoplatonism of Henry More, may have gained his 
interest in Boehme as well as some knowledge of him 
through More. Carlyle, deeply mystical by nature and edu- 
cation, had his Boehmenism at second hand from Thomas 
Erskine of Linlathen.^ 

In such a comparison we should note that the reawakening 
of the religious impulse, the deepening of the religious feel- 
ing in an attempt to make Christianity subjective, was closely 
connected, in Germany and England alike, with the rise of 
romanticism. The religious revival had shown itself in 
the general life of Europe, and most markedly in England, 
before it went into literature. Pietism in Germany and the 
evangelical movement in England helped greatly to prepare 
the ground for the reception of the new spirit in poetry, 
while the earlier English religious movement of the seven- 

* Notes and Queries, loth series, V, pp. 89, 135. 

^ C. F. E. Spurgeon : Mysticism in English Literature, p. 28. 



176 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

teenth century had laid the great foundation of the new 
spirit. The deep-seated purpose of those English sects to 
break down the slavery of superficial fashions and cramp- 
ing customs and to restore individual responsibility, spiritual 
initiative, and personal autonomy reminds one strongly of 
the work of the Storm and Stress period in Germany. Man 
himself, his inherited divine rights, and his eternal destiny 
were put in place of sacred and time-honored systems. 
Among the Quakers, however, as often with other mystics, 
the ascetic impulse, which a dualistic theory has usually 
aroused in the minds of those who- take religion seriously, 
tended to the esthetic and intellectual poverty that we find 
in place of the wealth of poetry that we should expect. 

In addition to this reawakening of the religious impulse 
in close connection with romanticism, we should note further 
a changed attitude, especially on the part of poets and phil- 
osophers, toward mythology. The need felt by the Ger- 
man romanticists for a new, Christian mythology, as op- 
posed to the old, classical mythology, had been supplied, in 
a great measure, by Boehme. In his poetic treatment of 
natural laws and phenomena, in his symbolic and allegorical 
interpretation of Christianity, Boehme had anticipated the 
scientific discoveries of modern times, and had prescribed 
the course for natural science in its peculiar task of helping 
to create the new mythology.^ In the English-speaking 
world, the Christian mythology of the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries came from the study of Milton, rather than 
from the study of the Bible. " Milton framed for himself 
not only a system of divinity but a system of mythology 
also," ^ and that has become the inheritance of our time. 
As Huxley says, " It is not the cosmogony of Genesis, but 

^ Walzel : Deutsche Romantik, pp. 47-49. 

' Robert Southey in London Quarterly Review, XXXVI, pp. 54-55- 



Romanticism 177 

the cosmogony of Milton that has enthralled the world." ^ 
What Boehme did for the romanticists of Germany in this 
respect, Milton has done for the English-speaking peoples. 

Marked features of the mystical thinking characteristic 
of the German romantic school are its impulsive radicalism 
and its prophetic tone. Milton is decidedly radical in his 
views on domestic and political freedom, and his utterances 
are prophetic as well. Fundamental to romanticism and 
particularly clearly expressed by Novalis is the conception 
of poet and philosopher combined to a higher unity, a type 
of absolute spiritual and intellectual leadership. Such a 
leader Milton became to his people in their struggles for 
freedom, just as later, during the period of liberation, in 
Germany poets like Korner and Schenkendorf entered the 
army. Milton, in fact, represents an entirely changed atti- 
tude toward the poet in England. From the mere enter- 
tainer, however welcome, of man's leisure hours, dependent 
upon the favor of princes, the poet rose to the high plane 
of instructor and uplifter of mankind, the friend and ad- 
viser of statesmen. Though his own ideals of a poet were 
very high, demanding even that the whole life of a poet 
should be a true and noble poem, the condition and spirit 
of his time rather than his own theory forced Milton, as a 
friend of statesmen and an officer of the Commonwealth, 
to play his serious and important role in the birth of free- 
dom. 

With the awakening of the love for external nature — the 
recognition of the bond between man and his environment — 
comes the lyric note of the romanticist with its longing, its 
melancholy, its love of nature and of music. It is a remark- 
able coincidence that melancholy, which plays such a role 
in music-loving Milton, should again play a great role 

^ Quoted in Cambridge History of Literature, VIII, p. 403. 



178 Milton and Jakob Boehme 

among the early English romanticists. This is not charac- 
teristic of // Penseroso alone, for the spirit of melancholy, 
which even Henry More associated with creative imagina- 
tion, the longing for paradise, for the unattainable, is a dis- 
tinctive tone in Paradise Lost. The beginnings of the his- 
torical feeling may also be sought in Milton; he speaks of 
Spenser as his forerunner. None of the preceding English 
poets had this historical sense ; Shakspere does not speak of 
his forerunners. 

The renewed interest in Boehme on the part of the writers 
of the German romantic school was not really a rediscovery 
of the Teutonic philosopher, for from the time of his death 
Boehme had admirers, in Germany as in England, who 
spread his writings and teachings, until they came to Tieck 
and Novalis and others eminently fitted to appropriate and 
assimilate them. In his entire thought-content Boehme be- 
longs to the romanticists. His whole conception of the 
world is imaginative; he compares the creation of the uni- 
verse by God to the creative power of thought in man. His 
emphasis is ever upon the feelings, the inward subjective 
viewpoint. No English translation has been able to repro- 
duce the picturesqueness of his language and figures. He 
is frankly simple and childlike ; many of his similes are 
taken from his observation of children. His angels are like 
little children, '' when they go in May to gather flowers ; 
then they often meet together, then they talk and confer 
friendly, and pluck or gather many several sorts of flowers. 
Now when this is done they carry those flowers in their 
hands, and begin a sportful dance, and sing for the joy of 
their heart rejoicing! Thus also do the angels in heaven." ^ 

One of the important aspects of the romantic movement 
lies in its attention to the history and further development 

^ Aurora, chap, xii, pp. 83-85. 



Romanticism 179 

of the conception of genius. Though the belief in genius 
was transmitted from antiquity through the schools, the idea 
of a God-inspired man as a creator vying with God or carry- 
ing on the work of God dates back only to Boehme and to 
Milton. That there was in Boehme a Titanic, Promethean 
element, an element that later culminated in Goethe's 
Prometheus, was felt instinctively by some of the phil- 
osopher's orthodox opponents. Thus Croese, author of a 
history of the Quakers, discussing the influence which 
Boehme had upon this sect, says of his teaching that " it is 
truly no Christian theology, but a storming of heaven and a 
war of wild, inhuman, and frightful giants against the 
gods." ^ How strongly Boehme emphasized this creative 
activity of man is shown in the following quotation : " Now 
every man is a creator of his works, powers, and doings ; that 
which he makes and frames out of his free-will, the same 
is received as a work of the manifested Word into each 
property's likeness. . . . The free-will is the creator or 
maker, whereby the creature makes, forms, and works." ^ 
This insistence upon the creative activity of man as poet 
grows into the romantic conception of genius which has 
always brought liberating power into the classic rules 
and traditions. To follow the history of the exten- 
sive discussion of the conception of genius in English 
literature from Dennis to Young will some day form an 
interesting chapter in the history of romanticism. If, after 
all, the romantic impulse did not gain such impetus in Eng- 
land as it did during the Storm and Stress period in Ger- 
many, the reason lies no doubt with English conditions and 
character. It is a remarkable fact, however, that in the 
discussions of Dennis and Addison, and afterwards of 

* Gerhard Croese : Quaker-Historic, Berlin, 1696, p. 749. 
^ Myst. Magn., chap, xxii, pp. 22-23. 



i8o Milton and Jakob Boehme 

Young, the chief champions of genius, Milton is repeatedly 
mentioned next to Shakspere as the type of modern genius. 
Yet Milton, in spite of his insistence upon the " inner light," 
his belief in genius and inspiration, was hardly a " naive " 
poet in Schiller's sense of the word. Milton's angels are 
not little children like Boehme's ; his representative of man 
in the state of original innocence is an Adam who preaches 
learnedly to his audience of one. Nevertheless Milton is as 
much a romanticist as he is a classicist ; it is not his purpose 
to imitate nature, but to give form to his own feelings, to 
the visions afforded by the light within. 

Closely related to this conception of genius is the romantic 
idea of nature as revealed in the poetry of primitive na- 
tions. The carrying out of this idea led to the discovery 
that this genius must be national in character, and that this 
again is best revealed in the oldest national poetry. Milton's 
theme, the original state of mankind, directly anticipates 
the later interest of Addison and the early romanticists in 
primitive peoples and their songs and in the old Eng- 
lish ballads. Utopia, paradise, the people, genius, romanti- 
cism — all of these conception^ are closely interwoven, and 
must have an important place in the interpretation of both 
Boehme and Milton. 

The living stream of thought and life which, since the 
time of the reformation, had poured from Germany into 
England, had produced there the sixteenth-century separa- 
tistic attempts at church reform, and then, during the sev- 
enteenth century, increased by the spring of Boehme's 
genius, had worked so powerfully in the founding of sects 
and the development of the worth of freedom, turned back 
as a tide to Germany, and in the esthetic discussions of the 
Swiss critics centering around Milton and his genius, pro- 
duced a Klopstock and the German Messias. The same 



Romanticism i8i 

stream carried the discovery of enraptured genius, the em- 
bodiment of creative power, from Young to Hamann and 
Herder, through whom it became a rushing cataract re- 
sounding with the praise of the creative power and the en- 
thusiastic rapture of genius in the Storm and Stress period. 
Like an ocean it swept along, carrying the discovery of the 
folksong, of the people, of the human heart, into the Ger- 
man romantic school, where, ripened and refined, the hu- 
manism of Neoplatonism in the teachings of Jakob Boehme 
was again prepared to start on its life-giving mission into 
the world. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

JOHN MILTON 

Poetical Works. Ed. Masson. London, 1907. 

Prose Works. Bohn Libraries. [Edition quoted in text.] 
Miscellanies. 3 vols. London, 1909. 
Christian Doctrine. 2 vols. London, 1904. 

Original Letters and Papers of State, addressed to Oliver Cromwell. 
Found among the Political Collections of Mr. John Milton. 
London, 1743. 

Liebert, Gustav : Milton. Studien zur Geschichte des englischen 
Geistes. Hamburg, i860. 

Masson, David : Life of Milton. 6 vols. Cambridge, 1859-80. In- 
dex vol. 1894. 

Osgood, C. G. : The Classical Mythology of Milton's English 
Poems. New York, 1900. 

Pauli, Reinhold : Aufsatze zur englischen Geschichte. Leipzig, 1883. 
Milton, pp. 348-92. 

Stern, Alfred : Milton und seine Zeit. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1879. 

Todd, H. J. : Some Account of the Life and Writings of John 
Milton. London, 1826. 

Toland, John : Life of Milton, with Amynto, or a defense of Mil- 
ton's life. London, 1699. Reprinted 1761. 

Treitschke, Heinrich von : Historische und Politische Aufsatze. 
Leipzig, 1871. Milton, Vol. I, pp. 1-54. 
(For extensive Milton bibliography, see Cambridge History of 

English Literature, Vol. VII.) 

JAKOB BOEHME 

I. List of Jakob Boehme's Works in the Order in which He 

Wrote Them 

1612. (i) The Aurora [unfinished]. With notes added by his own 
hand in 1620. 

1619. (2) The Three Principles of the Divine Essence. With an 

Appendix concerning the Threefold Life of Man. 

1620. (3) The Threefold Life of Man. 

(4) Answers to Forty Questions concerning the Soul, pro- 
posed by Dr. Balthasar Walter. With an Appendix Con- 
cerning the Soul and its Image, and of the Turba. 

183 



184 Bibliography 

(5) The Treatise of the Incarnation; in three parts, (i) Of 
the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, (ii) Of the Suffering, 
Dying, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, (iii) Of the 
Tree of Faith. 

(6) A Book of the Great Six Points. Also a small book of 
other Six Points. 

7) Of the Earthly and of the Heavenly Mystery. 
^8) Of the Last Times. (2 Epistles to P[aul] K[eym], in- 
cluded in (32) i.) 

1621. (9) De Signatura Rerum. 

10) Of the Four Complexions. 

11) Two Apologies to Balthasar Tylcken; (i) for the 
Aurora, (ii) for Predestination and the Incarnation. 

12) Considerations upon Esaiah Stiefel's Book concerning 
the Threefold State of Man, and the New Birth. 

1622. (13) A Book of True Repentance. 

14) A Book of True Resignation. 

15) A Book of Regeneration. 

16) An Apology in answer to Esaiah Stiefel concerning 
Perfection. 

1623. (17) A Book of Predestination and Election. 

18) A Short Compendium of Repentance. 

19) Mysterium Magnum. 
^20) A Table of the Divine Manifestation, or an Exposition 

of the Threefold World. 

1624. (21) The Supersensual Life. 
^22) Of Divine Contemplation or Vision [unfinished]. 
^23) Of Christ's Testaments, viz. : Baptism and the Supper. 
^24) A Dialogue between an enlightened and an unenlightened 

Soul (or the Discourse of Illumination). 
[2$) An Apology in answer to Gregory Richter [i.e., for the 

Books of True Repentance and True Resignation]. 
^26) 177 Theosophic Questions, with answers to 13 of them 

[unfinished]. 
'27) An Epitome of the Mysterium Magnum. 
'28) The Holy week or a Prayer Book [unfinished]. 
'29) A Table of the Three Principles. 
^30) A Book of the Last Judgment [lost]. 
[31) The Clavis. 
1618-1624. (32) 62 Theosophic Epistles, (i) 35 Epistles, (ii) 25 

Epistles, (iii) 2 other Epistles [7&20 in Ger. ed.], one 

prefixed to Supersensual Life (21), the other as Preface to 

Second Apology to B. Tylcken. 



Bibliography 185 

II. English Translations 

1645. Two Theosophical Epistles . . . Dialogue between an En- 
lightened and a Distressed Soul . . . Epistles i & 10 of 
(32) i and (24). 
The Tree of Christian Faith . . . (5)iii. 

1647. XL Questions concerning the Soule. Propounded by Dr. 

Balthasar Walter. Answered by Jacob Behmen . . . [Re- 
issue slightly altered 1665]. Sparrow. (4). 
The Clavis or Key, or, An Exposition of some principall 
Matters and words in the writings of Jacob Behmen . . . 
Sparrow. (31). 

1648. The Second Booke. Concerning the Three Principles of the 

Divine Essence . . . [With Appendix or . . . Description 
of the Threefold Life of Man. Tr. and preface by Spar- 
row]. (2). 
The Way to Christ Discovered . . . Blunden. Reprinted 

1654. (13), (14), (15), Epistle I of (32)iii, (21), (24), 
(18), Chapter XV of (3) and Epistle 32 of (32). Re- 
printed Bath, 1775, with addition of (10). 

1649. The Fourth Epistle. A Letter to Paul Keym . . . concern- 

ing our Last Times . . . The Fifth Epistle ... to Paul 
Keym . . . Sparrow. Epistles 4&5 in (32). 
The Epistles of Jacob Behmen. Ellistone. (32) i. 

1650. The High Deep Searching out of the Threefold Life of Man 

through the Three Principles . . . Sparrow. (3). 

1651. Signatura Rerum . . . Ejlistone. (9). 

1652. Of Christ's Testaments, viz. : Baptisme and the Supper . . . 

Sparrow. (23). 

1653. A Consideration upon the Book of Esaias Stiefel ... (12). 

1654. Mysterium Magnum, or An Exposition of the first book of 

Moses . . . Ellistone and Sparrow. (19) & {2'j^. 

The Tree of Christian Faith . . . (5)iii. 

Four Tables of Divine Revelation . . . Blunden. (20) i& (29). 

A Consolatory Treatise of the Four Complexions . . . Tr. 
and preface by C. Hotham. (10). Also 1730 [?], with dif- 
ferent tr. but same preface. 

1655. Jacob Behme's Table of the Divine Manifestation, or An Ex- 

position of the Threefold World. 
Concerning the Election of Grace . . . Sparrow. (17). 

1656. Aurora. That is the Day-spring . . . Tr. and pref. by Spar- 

row, (i). 
1659, The Fifth Book of the Authour, on Incarnation . . . Tr. and 
pref. by Sparrow. (5). 



1 86 Bibliography 

1661. Several Treatises of Jacob Behme . . . Sparrow. (6), (26), 

(7), (28), (22), (29), letter 6 of (32)1 re-translated. 

1662, The Remainder of books written by Jacob Behme . . . Spar- 

row. (32)iii, (11), (10), (12), (16), (25), (32)ii. 
1752. The Way to Christ discovered . . . Manchester. [Byrom's 

reprint of Blunden's 1648 ed.]. 
1775. The Way to Christ . . . The Four Complexions. [With 

preface and a different tr. from Blunden's 1648 & 1654], 

III. Collected Editions 
English: 

The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Philosopher, with 
figures illustrating his principles, left by the Reverend William 
Law, M.A., 1764-1781, four volumes (Vol. Ill, 1772; Vol. IV, 1781). 
Vol. I contains " Dialogue between Zelotes, Alphabetus, Rusticus 
and Theophilus," undoubtedly by Law. There is no complete Eng- 
lish edition of Boehme's works, although the various translations 
published between 1644 and 1663 include all of the works. This 
edition, generally called " Law's edition," contains only 17 of the 32 
treatises: In Vol. I, Life, (i), (2); Vol. II, (3), (4), (5), (31); 
Vol. Ill, (19), (20); Vol. IV, (9). (17), (13), (14), (IS), (21), 
(24), (10), (23). The edition was published by Law's friends, 
George Ward and Thomas Langcake, after Law's death, at the cost 
of Mrs. Hutcheson. It was reprinted in the main from the early 
texts. 

A complete reprint of Boehme's works in English has been begun 
by C. J. Barker, London. Already have appeared : 
Threefold Life, 1909. 
Three Principles, 1910. 
Forty Questions and the Clavis, 1911. 

German: 

[Only one small volume of Boehme's works, Der Weg zu 
Christo, was published during his lifetime. His MSS. went to 
Holland, and were printed one at a time at Amsterdam by Heinrich 
Beets, a Dutch merchant, between 1633 and 1676. Three treatises, 
Christ's Testaments, Book of Prayer, 177 Theosophic Questions, 
were also printed at Dresden, 1641-1642. The first collected edition 
was by J. G. Gichtel, Amsterdam, 1682.] 

Des Gottseeligen Hoch Erleuchteten Jacob Bohmens Teutonic! 
Philosophi Alle Theosophische Wercken. Gichtel. Amster- 
dam, 1682 & 1 71 5. 



Bibliography 187 

Theosophische Revelata. Das ist: Alle gottllche Schriften ... J. 

Bohmens . . . mit Gichtels Summarien ausgezieret. 7 vols. 

Amsterdam, 1730-31. (Best and fullest edition of Boehme.) 
Jakob Bohmes Sammtliche Werke. K. W. Schiebler. 7 vols. 

Leipzig. 1831-46 & i860. 

IV. Biographical and Critical 

The Life of one Jacob Boehmen : Who although he were a Very 
Meane man, yet wrote the most Wonderfull deepe Knowl- 
edge in Naturall and Divine Things that any hath been 
known to doe since the Apostles Times, London, 1644. 
[The earliest and best life of B. is that written by his friend 
Abraham von Frankenberg, (in Latin) in 1637, in the printed edi- 
tions always dated 1651. It reached Amsterdam and was trans- 
lated into German about 1638 and was probably circulated in MS. 
It is printed in many editions of B.'s works, such as the Forty 
Questions published 1665 in London, or the German 1682 Amster- 
dam edition, and it forms the basis of all the other lives, such as 
this earliest English one, or that in " Law's edition."] 
Abdolonymus: Antwort auf die 177 Theosophische Fragen. Leip- 
zig, 1785. 
Adolarius, L. : Schatzkastlein aus Jakob Bohmes Schriften. 

Weimar, 1855. 
Allen, G. W. : A Master Mystic. An Introduction to the teachings 
of Jacob Boehme, in the Theosophical Review 1904-5, Vol. 
XXXV, pp. 202, 321, 420, and Vol. XXXVI, p. 160. 
A Series of Excerpts from Boehme with comments, in the Seeker 
(ed. Allen, G. W.), Nov., 1906; Aug., Nov., 1907; May, 
Aug., Nov., 1908; Feb., May, Aug., Nov., 1909. 
Anderdon, John : One Blow at Babel in those of the People called 

Behmenites. London, 1662. 
Bastian, Albert: Der Gottesbegriff bei Jakob Bohme. Kiel. 1905. 
Baur, Christ. Ferd. : Zur Geschichte der protestantischen Mystik, in 

Theologisches Jahrbuch, 1848-49. 
Bax, Clifford : Signature of all things ; with other writings. In- 
troduction by Bax. London, 1912. 
Bleek, F. : Jakob Bohme von Zank und Streit der Gelehrten . . . 

befreit . . . Berlin, 1823. 
Boutroux, E. : Le Philosophe allemand Jacob Boehme. Paris, 1888. 
Brockhaus: Konversations-Lexicon. Leipzig. New ed., 1901. Arti- 
cle on Boehme. 
Bromley, Thomas : The Way to the Sabbath of Rest, or the soul's 
progress in the work of the new birth. London, 1655. Re- 
printed 1692, 1710. 



i88 Bibliography 

Calo, J. A. : De Vita Jacobi Bohmii. Vitemberg, 1707. 

Calovius, D. A. : Anti-Bohmius. 2nd ed, Leipzig, 1690. 

Classen, J. : Jakob Bohme. Sein Leben und seine theosophischen 

Werke. 3 vols. Stuttgart, 1883-86. 
Der Jakob Boehme epitomiert oder Seraphinische Blumengart- 

lein. Amsterdam, 1700. 
Deussen, Paul : Jakob Bohme. Uber sein Leben und seine Phi- 

losophie. Leipzig, 191 1. 
Die letzte Posaune an alle Volker oder Prophezeyungen des Jakob 

Bohmens. Berlin, 1779. 
E[ccles], F. : Christian Information . . . prophetical Passages out 

of Jacob Behme's Works. London, 1664. 
Epistles, The, reprinted with introduction by a Graduate of Glas- 
gow University. Glasgow, 1886. 
Fechner, H. A. : Jakob Bohme, sein Leben und seine Schriften. In 

Neues Lausitser Magasin, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 313-446. 

Gorlitz, 1857. 
Francisci, E. : Dess, in der Person eines falschgenannten Matthaei 

vereinigten, Spott-und-Laster-Pfeile . . . Orthodoxiae 

Bomianae . . . auf die Schau gelegt . . . 1692, 
Freher, Dionysius Andreas : Of the analogy in the process of the 

philosophical work to the redemption of man, through Jesus 

Christ, according to the writings of Jacob Behmen. In 

Lives of Alchemistical Philosophers, pp. 121 ff. London, 

1815. 
Fry, J. M. : Tauler and Boehme. In Some Papers and Addresses. 

Birmingham, 1900. 
Fuchs : Beitrage zu einer richtigen Wiirdigung Jakob Bohmes in 

Beweis des Glaubens. In Neues Lausitser Magasin, Vol. 

XXXIII. 
Hamberger, Julius : Die Lehre des deutschen Philosophen, Jakob 

Bohme. Munich, 1844. 
Harless, G. C. A. von : Jakob Bohme und die Alchemisten. Berlin, 

1870. 
Hartley, Thomas: Paradise Restored ... A Short Defence of the 

Mystical Writers. London, 1764. 
Hartmann, Franz: Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehmen. London, 

1891. 
Hauck-Herzog : Realencylopadie fur protestantische Theologie und 

Kirche. Leipzig, 1906. 
Herwech, G. : Tractatius quo atheismum fanaticismi sivi Bomii . . . 

eruit. Lipsiae at Wismariae. 1709. 
Historia Jakob Bohmens . . . Hamburg, 1698. 



Bibliography 189 

Holland, Bernhard : Dialogues on the Supersensual Life. [Ed. by- 
Holland.] London, 1901. 

Hotham, Charles : Ad Philosophiam Teutonicam Manductio. Lon- 
don, 1648. Tr. under title Introduction to the Teutonick 
Philosophy by D. F. [i.e., Durand Prater, Durand Hotham]. 
London, 1650. 

Hotham, Durand: Life of Jacob Behmen. London, 1654. 

Jaegerus, J. W. : De Jacobo Boehmio judicium H. Mori disputa- 
tione discussum. Tubingen, 1708. 

Law, William: Works. 9 vols. London, 1753-76. Reprinted pri- 
vately by G. Moreton, 1892-93. 
The Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law. Ed. by 
W. Scott Palmer, 1908. 
[See especially for Boehme To the Christianity of the Age. 

Notes comprising an elucidation of scope and contents of the 

writing of Jacob Behmen, and The way to divine knowledge, being 

several dialogues . . . preparatory to a new edition of the works of 

Jacob Behmen. See also chap, xii of Cambridge History of English 

Literature, Vol. IX, 1912.] 

Made, I.: Miroir temporel de I'Eternite . . . traduit de I'Allemand 
par le Sr. I. Made. Francfurt, 1669. [There is also an 
engraved title-page reading: De signitura rerum c'est a dire 
De la signiture de toutes choses . . . vraij miroir temporel 
de Teternite.] 

Martensen, H. L. : Jacob Bohme : His Life and Teaching. Tr. by 
T. Rhys Evans. London, 1885. 

Mercurius Teutonicus : or Christian Information concerning the 
last Times . . . gathered out of the mystical] writings of 
. . . Jacob Behmen. London, 1649. Another ed. 1656. 
Extracts from Mercurius Teutonicus . . . repeated in pro- 
phetical passages concerning the present times . . . Richard 
Brothers. London, 1795. 

Mettallurgia Bohmiana . . . Eine Beschreibung der Metallen 
nach ihrem Ursprung . . . Nach des Jacob Bohmii prin- 
dpiis. Amsterdam, 1695. 

More, Henry: Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura. London, 1670. 
[See also Enthusiasmus Triumphatus and Divine Dialogues.} 

Okeley, Francis : Memoirs of Jacob Behmen. Northampton, 1780. 
[A collection of all documents giving first-hand informa- 
tion of B.'s life and works.] 

Peip, A. : Jakob Bohme der deutsche Philosoph. Leipzig, i860. 

Penny, Anne Judith : An Introduction to the Study of Jacob 
Boehme's Writings. New York, 1901. 
Studies in Jacob Boehme. London, 1912. 



1 90 Bibliography 

Petersen, H. : Grundzuge der Ethik Jakob Bohmes. Eriangen, 
1901. 

Poiret, Pierre: Petri Poiret Bibliotheca Mysticorum selecta. Am- 
sterdam, 1708. 

Pordage, John : A Treatise of Eternal Nature with Her seven 
Essential Forms . . . by J. P. M. D. London, 1681. [An 
account of Boehme's philosophy by Dr. Pordage, bound with 
his Theologia Mystica.] Reprinted 1770 under the title: 
A Compendious View of the Grounds of the Teutonic 
Philosophy. Published by a Gentleman retired from 
Business. 
Theological and Practical Divinity: with Extracts of several 
Treatises written by Jacob Behmen. Published by a Gen- 
tleman retired from Business. 1769. 

Rainy, C. A. : Thoughts on the Spiritual Life. Edinburgh, 1896. 

Selections from Boehme. Preface by Hugh Black. London, 
1908. 

Ratze, J. G. : Blumenlese aus Jakob Bohmens Schriften, nebst der 
Geschichte seines Lebens. Leipzig, 1819. 

Roffe, Alfred : The real religion of Shakspeare. With a lecture on 
Jacob Behmen. London, 1872. 

Rumpaeus, J. W. : De Jacobo Bohmio. Susati, 1714. 

Ruth, Jacob : Christosophia oder Der Weg zu Christo. Ephrata in 
Pensylvanien, 1811-12. [First American edition of 
Boehme.] 

Scharling, C. H. : Jakob Bohmes Theosophi. En religious-phi- 
losophisk og dogmatisk Undersogelse. Kjobenhi, 1879. 

Schonwalder: Lebensbeschreibung Jakob Bohmes. Gorlitz, 1895. 

Schwarz, Hermann : Der Gottesgedanke in der Geschichte der Phil- 
osophic. Erster Teil. Heidelberg, 1913. 

Sedir, P. : Les temperaments et la culture psychique, d'apres Jacob 
Boehme. 1894. 

Swainson, W. P. : Jacob Boehme the God-taught philosopher. Lon- 
don, 1905. 

Sylvester : Die hohe Bedeutung der Tauf e und des Abendmahls nach 
Jakob Bohmen. 1866. 

Taylor, E. J. : Behmen's theosophick philosophy unfolded. London, 
1691. 

Tscheer, N. : Einleitung zum wahren und griindlichen Erkanntnis 
des grosses Geheimnisses der Gottseligkeit. Amsterdam, 
1718. 

Tschesch, J. T. von: Zweifache Apologia und Verantwortung auf 
die fiinf lasterlichen Hauptpuncte D. Gilberti ... wider die 
Person und Schriften . . . Jakob Bohmens. 1676. 



Bibliography 191 

Umbreit, A. E. : Jakob Bohme. Eine Gedankenreihe iiber das im 
Leben der Menschheit sich gestaltende Moment. 1835. 

[Walton, C] : Notes and Materials for an adequate Biography of 
the celebrated Divine and Philosopher, William Law. Lon- 
don, 1854. [This work, " a treasury of biography and bibli- 
ographical information " relating to Boehme, Freher, Law 
and other mystical writers, was compiled and printed for 
private circulation. The entire edition of 500 copies was 
given by the author to libraries and public institutions.] 
Behmen, Law and other Mystics on the past, present and 
future, with regard to Creation, written from a knowledge 
of the philosophy of Jacob Behmen. [By J. P. Greaves and 
C. Walton.] London, 1847. 

Whyte, Alexander : Jacob Boehmen : An Appreciation. Edinburgh, 
1894. 

Wuller, W. L. : Jakob Bohmes Leben und Lehre. Stuttgart, 1836. 



V. Later Interest in Boehme in England, and in Germany in 
THE Early Nineteenth Century, Returning Thence to Eng- 
land. 

Baader, F. von: Sammtliche Werke. 16 vols. Leipzig, 1851-60. 

[Especially Vorlesungen uber Speculative Dogmatik.] 
Blake, William: Works. Ed. Ellis and Yeats. 3 vols. London, 

1893. 
Poetical Works. Ed. Ellis. 2 vols. London, 1906. 
Life, by Gilchrist. 2 vols. London, 1880. 
Coleridge, S. T, : Complete Poetical Works. Ed. E. H. Coleridge. 
2 vols. Oxford, 1912. 
Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. 2 vols. Oxford, 

1907. 
Notes to Southey's Life of Wesley. 3rd ed. 1846. Vol. I, 
p. 476. 
Ederheimer, E. : Jakob Bohme und die Romantiker. Heidelberg, 

1904. [B.'s influence on Tieck and Novalis.] 
Fouque, Baron Friedrich de la Motte : Jakob Bohme : ein biograph- 

ischer Denkstein. Greiz, 1831. 
Hegel, G. W. F. : Geschichte der Philosophic, Vol. HI ; Werke, Ber- 
lin, 1836. Vol. XV, pp. 296-327. 
Hoffman, F. : Franz von Baader in seinem Verhaltniss zu Hegel und 

Schelling. Leipzig, 1850. 
Schelling, F. W. J. : Philosophische Untersuchungen iiber das Wesen 
der menschlichen Freiheit. 1809. 
Denkmal der Schrift . . . des Herrn F. H. Jacobi. 1812. 



192 Bibliography 

Schlegel, K. W. F. von : Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophic des 
Lebens. 1828. 

Vorlesungen aus den Jahren 1804-06. Vol. I, pp. 424-29. 

Geschichte der neuen Literatur, 1815. Vol. II. 
Schopenhauer, A. : Handschriftliche Nachlass. Leipzig, 1864. 

GENERAL HISTORY AND CRITICISM 

Allgemeine deutsche Biographic. Leipzig, 1875-1910. 

Althaus, Friedrich : Samuel Hartlib. Ein deutsch-cnglischcs Char- 

acterbild. Leipzig [1885?]. 
Arnold, Gottfried : Kirchen- und Kctzcrhistoric. 2 vols. Frankfurt 

a. M., 1729. 
Baillie, Robert; Letters and Journals of. Ed. David Laing. 3 vols. 

Edinburgh, 1841-42. 
Barclay, R. : The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Com- 
monwealth. London, 1876. 
Barrett, F. : Lives of the Alchemistical Philosophers. London, 1815. 
Bax, E. B. : The Rise and Fall of Anabaptism. London, 1903. 
Baxter, Richard : Reliquiae Baxterianae, or Mr. Richard Baxter's 

narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and 

times. Ed. Matthew Sylvester. London, 1696. 
Begemann, W. : Vorgeschichte und Anfange der Freimaurerei in 

England. 2 vols. Berlin, 1910. 
Berens, L. H. : The Digger Movement. London, 1906. 
Blunt, J. H. : Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties 

and Schools of Religious Thought. 1874. 
Bohme, A. W. : Acht Biicher von der Reformation der Kirche in 

England. Altona, 1734. 
Boyle, The Honorable Robert : Works. 6 vols. London, 1772. Life, 

by Thomas Birch. London, 1744. 
Braithwaite, W. C. : The Beginnings of Quakerism. London, 1912, 
Burrage, Champlin : The Early English Dissenters in the Light of 

Recent Research. 1550-1641. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1912. 
Campbell, Douglas : The Puritan in England, Holland and America. 

2 vols. London, 1892. 
Carriere, Moriz: Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reforma- 

tionszeit. Leipzig, 1887. 
Colberg, M. Ehregott Daniel: Das Platonisch-Hermetische Chris- 

tenthum. Leipzig, 1710. 
Comenius Gesellschaft, Monatshefte der. Berlin, 1892-1913. 
Croese, Gerhard^: Quaker-Historie. Berlin, 1696. 
Delacroix, H. : Etudes d'Histoire et de Psychologic du Mysticismc. 

Paris, 1908. 



Bibliography 193 

Dennis, John : The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poe- 
try. London, 1701. 
The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry. London, 1704. 

Dircks, Henry: A Biographical Memoir of Samuel Hartlib. Lon- 
don, 1865. 

Edwards, Thomas: Gangraena or Catalogue of Errors, Heresies. 
London, 1643. 

Feustking, T. H. : Gymnaceum Haeretico-fanaticum oder Historic 
. . . der falschen Prophetinnen. Leipzig, 1704. 

Fox, George : A Journal, or Historical Account of the life, travels, 
sufferings . . . of . . . George Fox. 2 vols. 1694-98. Ed. 
from the MSS. by Norman Penney. 2 vols. Cambridge, 
1911. 

Fuller, Thomas : The Church History of Britain. 3 vols. London, 
1868. 

Gichtel, J. G. : Theosophica Practica. 3rd ed. Leyden, 1722. 

Gooch, G. P. : English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century. 
Cambridge, 1898. 

Guhrauer: Joachim Jungius und sein Zeitalter. Stuttgart u. Tu- 
bingen, 1850. 

Hamelius, Paul: Die Kritik in der englischen Literatur des 17. und 
18. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig, 1897, 

Hermetis Trismegisti. Seven Chapters. London, 1692. 

Hiigel, Baron F. von: The Mystical Element in Religion. 2 vols. 
1909. 

Huggins, Sir William : The Royal Society. London, 1906. 

Hylkema, C. B. : Reformateurs. Haarlem, 1902. 

Inge, W. R. : Christian Mysticism. London, 1899. 

James, William : Varieties of Religious Experience. 1905. 

Jones, Rufus M. : Studies in Mystical Religion. London, 1909. 

Keller, Ludwig : Die geistigen Grundlagen der Freimaurerei und das 
offentliche Leben. Jena, 191 1. 

Lamprecht, K. G. : Deutsche Geschichte. 5 vols. Berlin, 1891-96. 

Marsden, J. B. : History of Christian Churches and Sects. 2 vols. 
1856. 

More, Henry: Life of the Learned and Pious Dr. Henry More. 
By Richard More. 1710. Ed. with intro. and notes by M. 
F. Howard. London, 191 1. 

Opel, J. O. : Valentin Weigel. Leipzig, 1864. 

Overton, J. H. : Life in the English Church, 1660-1714. London, 
1885. 

Pagitt, Ephraim: Heresiography. London, 1647. 



194 Bibliography 

Pattison, Mark: Tendencies of Religious Thought in England. [In 

Essays and Reviews.] i860. 
Essays. Oxford, 1889. 
Recejac, E. : Essai sur les fondemonts de la connaissance mystique. 

Paris, 1897. [Eng. tr. S. C. Upton. 1899.] 
Ritschl, Albrecht: Geschichte des Pietismus. 3 vols. Bonn, 

1880-86. 
Sachse, J. F. : The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania. 

Philadelphia, 1895. 
Schneider, F. J. : Die Freimaurerei und ihr Einfluss auf die geistige 

Kultur in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. 

Prag, 1909.^, 
Sippell, Theodor: Uber den Ursprung des Quakertums. In Christ- 

liche Welt (Marburg), 1910. Nr. 19, 20, 21. 
Skeats, H. S. : A History of the Free Churches of England. 1894. 
Spurgeon, C. F. E. : Mysticism in English Literature. Cambridge, 

1913. 
Stockl, Albert: Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters. 3 vols. 

Mainz, 1866. 
Straus, O. S. : Roger Williams. New York, 1894. 
Troeltsch, Ernst: Die Soziallehren der christlichen Gruppen und 

Kirchen. Tiibingen, 1912. 
Tulloch, J. : Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England 

in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1872. 
Underbill, Evelyn : Mysticism. London, 1912, 
Vaughan, R. A. : Hours with the Mystics. 2 vols. London, 1880. 
Waite, A. E. : Studies in Mysticism. London, 1906. 

The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah. London, 1910. 
Walzel, O. F. : Deutsche Romantik. Leipzig, 1912. 
Weingarten, Hermann : Die Revolutionskirchen Englands. Leipzig, 

1868. 
Williams, Roger, Letters of, in Narragansett Club Publications. 

Vol. VI. Providence, 1866-74. 
Wood, Anthony a: Athenae et Fasti Oxonienses. Ed. Philip Bliss. 

London, 1813. 
Worthington's Diary. Ed. by James Crossley. Manchester. Vol. I, 

1847; Vol. II, Pt. I, 1855; Vol. II, Pt. II, 1886. . 
Zeitschrift fur Historische Theologie. Vol. XXXV. 



INDEX 



Absolute, the, 2, 6, 43 
Academy, 7, 18, 19, 20, 22, 63, 64, 

72, 76, 81, 82, 103, 104, 117, 

118, 136 
Addison, 171, 172, 179, 180 
Agrippa, Cornelius von Nettes- 

heim, 10, 13, 50, 78 
Ainsworth, Henry, 38 
Albertus Magnus, 10 
Alchemy, 2, 8, 10, 11, 13, 17, 29, 

44, 49, 50, 52, 76, 80, 81, 83, 

84, 92, 96 
Althaus, 120* 
Anabaptists, 14, 15. 34, 36, Z7, 4i, 

43, 45, 54, 55, 64, 67, 94, 97, 

104. See Baptists 
Anderdon, John, 98 
Andreae, Johann Valentin, 17, 

18, 20, 21, 22, 68, 69, 71, 85, 

121 
Angels, 8, 95, 141, I47 
Anti-Christ, 42 
Antilia-Macaria, y^y 75 
Antilians, 76 
Antinomians, 54, 55 
Aquinas, Thomas, 3, 4 
Aristotle, 61 
Arminianism, 55 
Arndt, Johann, 12, 15, 18, 20, 

97 
Arnold, Gottfried, 13*, 17*, 96 
Arnoldus, Villanovanus, 10 
Ashmole, Elias, 79, 79*, 95 
Astrology. See Magic 
Aubrey, 79 
Audland, John, loi 
Augustine, Saint, 3, 4, 45 

Baader, Franz von, 175 
Bacon, Francis, 22, 62, 71, 80 



Bacon, Roger, 10 

Baker, the Venerable Augustine, 

47 
Bailhe, 41, 54, 127* 
Baptism, infant, 54, 102* 
Baptists, 38, 115 

Barclay, Robert, 100, 100*, 103* 
Barker, C. J., 59*, 6o* 
Bayley, William, loi, 102* 
Baxter, Richard, 94, 96, 97, 

98, 99, III 
Beale, 72 
Begemann, 17* 
Berens, 113* 
Berge, von, 122 
Berkeley, 81 

Bernard, Saint, 3, 4, 45, 46 
Bernegger, 18, 22 
Bernhard de Trevigo, 10 
Betkius [Beets], 77, 85* 88 
Bible, 3, II, 12, 15, 41, 43, 70, 108, 

133, 135, 163 
Birch, 71*, 72* 
Blake, William, 175 
Blunden, 56, 60, 62, 95 
Boehme, A. W., 36*, 56*, 78*, 99* 
Boehme, 25, 26, 27, 57, 61, 62, 88, 
98, 114 
academies, 81 

alchemy, 30, 78. 82, 90, 107 
Antilians, 76, 77 
authority, 163 
critics, 59, 60, 90, 91, 96, 99, 

105, 109, no 
democracy, 138 
Jev^rs, 89 

life, 24, 57, 62, 84 
literary influence, 138, 170, 

172, 175 
poHtics, III 



195 



196 



Index 



Boehme : 
Quakers, 91, 94, 100, loi 
science, 80, 81 
social reform, 82, 180 
spread of interest in, 56, 57, 
61, ^7, 77, 90, 91, loi, 104, 
114 
students of, 59, 79, 81, 83, 84, 
90, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 
no, III, 112, 113, 134, 170, 
177, 178 
style, 60, 93, 94, 95 
teachings, 82, 100, 133, 140, 

144, 176, 178, 179 
works, 56, 58, 60, 77, 79, 81, 88, 
103, 108, 109, 135 
Boehmenists, 12, 67, 92, 93, 94, 
96, 98, 99, 100, 102*, 104, 
107 
Bonaventura, 3 
Boreel, Adam, 68, 89, 120 
Boyle, Robert, 22, 65, 71, 72, 7Zy 

74, 120, 121, 122 
Braithwaite, 100* 
Brewster, Sir David, 80 
Brice, Edmund, 106 
Bromeley, 106 
Browne, Robert, 38 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 76 
Brownists, 38, 41 
Brunnquell, Ludwig, 107 
Bruno, Giordano, 22 
Bunyan, 43, 54 
Burroughs, 40 
Byrom, John, 175 

Cabalistic. See Kabalah 
Calvinism, 18, 34, 35, 3^ 
Camm, John, loi 
Campanella, 22, 71, 72 
Carlyle, Thomas, 175 
Carriere, 9*, 24*, 91 
Casaubon, Meric, 90 
Catholicism, 34, 35, 39, 48, 98 
Cheyne, 108, 109* 
Christ, 12, 15, 19, 21, 38, 40, 112, 

142, 143, 158, 159, 160, 162 
Christianity, 2, 23, 72, 73, 139, 

175, 176 



Church, 3, 7, 14, 18, 24, 29, 33, 

34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 47, 66, 82, 

123 
English, 32, 35, 48, 49, 97 
Lutheran, 13, 18, 19, 33, 34 
and state, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 

127, 166, 174 
Civil War, 35, 52, 54, 69, 74, 128 
Cloud of Unknowing, the, 4 
Colberg, 15, 84* 
Coleridge, 170, 175 
College, Invisible, 76, 89, 122 
Collegiants, 68, 89 
Comenius, 18, 21, 22, 62, 64, 69, 

70, 71, 75, 82, 86*, 88, 121, 

122 
Confessio Fraternitatis, 16, 17 
Congregational Way, 38, 39, 40, 

41, 128 
Conway, Lady Anne, 92 
Coppe, Abiezer, 96 
Cressy, Father Serenus, 48 
Crisp, Stephen, 102 
Croese, 107, 179 
Cromwell, 19, 39, 46, 53, 54, 64, 

89, no, in, 112, 127, 133, 

138 
Cults, Oriental, 2 

Dell, William, 46, no 
Democracy, 36, 39, 103, in 
Dennis, John, 171, 172, 179 
Descartes, 62, 167 
Denck, Hans, 45 
Diggers, 40, 113 

Dionysius, 3, 4, 6, 13, 45, 46, 49 

Dury, John, 22, 47, 65-69, 82, 88, 

89, 96, 120, 121, 122, 126 

Eccles, F., loi 
Eckhart, 4, 5, 3i 
Ecstasy, 2, 15, 25 
Edwards, Thomas, 55 
Ellistone, John, 56 
Ellwood, Thomas, 99, 134 
Emotions, 138, 170, 171, 173 
Ennemoser, 96 

Enthusiasm, 41, 52, 55, 57, 96, 
100, 108, 112, 128 



Index 



197 



Episcopacy, 40, 46 
Erasmus, 32 

Erigena, John Scotus, 3, 13 
Eusebius, 86* 

Everard, John, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50 
Evil, 29, 43, 100, 114, 124, 140, 
141, 148, 150 

Faith, 2, 7, 13, 14, 25, 33 

Fama Fraternitatis, 16, 17, 20, 

71,78 
Familists, 41, 44, 45, 55, 67, 94, 

97, 100 
Felgenhauer, Paul, 83, 89, 98 
Ferrar, Nicolas, 48, 49 
Ficinus, Marsilius, 7, 18, 51 
Fludd, Robert, 21, 30, 50 
Fouque, 175 
Fox, George, 62, 100, loi, 103, 

III, 112 
Francis, Saint, 45 
Franck, Sebastian, 5, 12, 13, 25, 

30, 46 
Frankenberg, Abraham von, 77, 

84, 85* 88, 89 
Freedom, 12, 13, 16, 19, 28, 29, 

32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 46, 54, 

94, 108, 113, 119, 127, 128, 

164. See Toleration 
Free-v^ill, 82, 123, 149 
Freher, 108, 109 
Fretwell, Ralph, 102 
Friends of God, 103, 105 
Friends, 102, 104. See Quakers 
Fuller, 37*, 42 

Galileo, 117 

Genius, 1 78-181 

George, David, 41, 97 

Gibson, Edmund, 37* 

Gibson, William, 102* 

Gifftheyl, 90 

God, 13, 26, 27, 29, 43, 59, 114, 

141 -145. See Christ, Holy 

Spirit, Trinity 
Goethe, 175, i79 
Gooch, G. P., 40* 
Good and Evil, 27, 28, 85, 161 
Goodwin, 40 



Gott, Samuel, 113 
Gravius, Theodoricus, 79 
Grotius, Hugo, 22, 117, 118, 

139 
Guhrauer, 22 

Haak, 22, 64, 121, 122 
Hamann, 181 
Harless, Adolph von, 30 
Hartlib, Samuel, 22, 65-77, 83, 

86, 87, 88, 90, 1 19-125, 134 
Hegel, 175 

Helmont, J. B., 11, 22, 30, 92 
Helmont, Mercurius, 11, 92 
Helvetius, 88, 89 
Herder, 181 
Hermes, 7, 51, 61, 62 
Hilton, Walter, 4 
Holstein, Lucas, 117 
Holy Spirit, 15, 38, 59, 60, 68, 

86*, 105, 106, 130, 131, 134, 

139, 144-146, 156, 166 
Hotham, Charles, 47, 60, 61, 

92 
Hotham, Durant, 47, 60-63 
Hotham, Sir John, 47, loi 
Hotham, Justice, 100, loi 
Howgil, Francis, loi 
Huggins, Sir William, 79* 
Humanism, 19, 31, 32, 33, 64, 70, 

71, 81, 103, 137, 181 
Hylkema, 89* 

Imagination, 129, 137, 144, 152, 

153, 154, 171, 172, 173, 178 
Independents, 38, 40, 46, 47, 52- 

55, 63, 67, 95, 98, 103, III, 

115, 127, 132, 136 
Inner Light, 2, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 

26, 34, 43, 46, 47, 51, 52, 55, 

59, 68, 76, 84, 97, 100, no, 

112, 114, 131, 132, 138, 146, 

161, 166, 167, 180 
Inspiration, 2, 15, 41, 52, 70, 96, 

129 
Ironsides, 83 

Jessop, Edmund, 42, 43 
Johnson, Francis, 38 



198 



Index 



Jones, R. M., 37 
Jones, Richard, 65 
Julian of Norwich, 4, 32 
Jung-Stelling, 175 
Jungius, Joachim, 22 

Kabalah, 8, 11, 13, 29, 92, 93, 96 

Karlstadt, 14 

Keller, Ludwig, 19 

Kelpius, Johann, 107 

a Kempis, Thomas, 5, 11, 13, 31, 

46, 50, 84 
Kepler, Johann, 22 
Klopstock, 152*, 180 
Knowledge, 6, 7, 13, 23, 69, 70, 

162 
Knox, John, 36 
Korner, 177 

Laud, Archbishop, 39 

Lavater, 81 

Law, William, 79, 80, 81, 108, 

109, 175 
Lead, Jane, 106, 108 
Lee, Francis, 108 
Leibnitz, 18, 22 
Levellers, 40 
Liebert, 123 
Lloyd, Morgan, iii 
Lloyd, Lodowick, 56 
Lully, 10^ 63 
Luther, 11, 12, 16, 25, 31, 32, 33 

Magic, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 17, 

52, 83, 86*, 96 
Marianus, Angelus, 84 
Masson, 19, 117* 
Mede, Joseph, 83, 120 
Medici, 7, 18 

Melancholy, 118, 177, 178 
Menasseh ben Israel, 89 
Meth, Ezekiel, 98 
Methodists, no 
Millennium, 15, 83, 174 
Milton, 53, 55, 61, 89, 112, 115 ff. 

academy, 65, 117 

Areopagitica, 119, 123, 124 

authority, 131, 163 

classicism, 137 



Milton : 
Commonwealth, 126, 138, 177 
on education, 116, 119 
heterodox views, 132 
independency, 123 
inspiration, 128, 138 
interest in Boehme, 161 
predestination, 119 
romanticism, 137, 170, 171, 173, 

175 
state church, 123, 125 
Mirandola» Pico de, 8, 9 
More, Henry, 49, 51, 60, 71, 91, 

93, 175, 178 

More, Sir Thomas, 32, 113 

Muggleton, Lodowick, 99 

Miinzer, 14 

Murray, Sir Robert, 79 

Mylius, Hermann, 122 

Mysticism, 1-6, 11, 16, 24, 31, 32, 
34, 45, 49, 63, 70, 83, 84, 94, 
96, 114, 127, 172, 173 

Mystics, I, 3, 4, 5, 13, 23, 26, 32, 

34, .35, Zl, 43, 44, 48, 49, 97, 
98, 105, 106, 173, 176 
Mythology, 176 

Neoplatonism, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 
12, 13, 18, 24, 48, 49, 50, 51, 
55, 63, 84, 91, 92, 93, 114 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 79, 80 

Nicholas, Henry, 41 

Nova Solyma, 113 

Novalis, 175, 177, 178 

Oldenburg, Heinrich, 65, 121, 

122 
Opel, 17, 98* 152* 
Opitz, 22 
Origenes, 45 
Oxenstierna, 22, 70 

Pagit, Dr., 134 

Pagitt, Ephraim, 55 

Pauli, 115* 

Patricius, Franciscus, 71 

Paracelsus, 10, 11, 13. 25, 30, 50, 

51, 17, 78, 84, 92, 97 
Pegnitz Society, 20 



Index 



199 



Pell, 62, 121, 122, 126 
Penney, Norman, 100 
Pennington, Isaac, 134 
Pepys, Samuel, 79 
Peters, Hugh, no 
Philadelphists, 105, 107, 108, 

109*, 133 
Philosopher's Stone, 10, 11, 16, 

30, 50, 63, 76, T]-^ 
Philosophy, 2, 3, 4. I3, 16, 20, 22, 

117 
Pietists, 107, no, 175 
Pilgrim Fathers, y? 
Plato, 7, 45, 49, 61, 62, 63, 71, 92 
Plotinus, 2, 3, 6, 7, 19, 25, 45, 49, 

61, 64, 92 
Poleman, Joachim, 73, 74, '^(i, 87 
Pordage, John, 95, 106 
Porphyry, 6 
Prayer, 25, 130, 167 
Predestination, 132, 169 
Presbyterians, 39, 115, 123, 124, 

125 

Proclus, 3, 45, 49 
Prophecy, 2, 52, 83, I77 
Protestantism, 19, 48, 64 
Pufendorf, 22 
Puritanism, 4, 40, 108, 115 
Puritans, 36, 37, 38, 67 
Pythagoras, 61, 62 

Quakers, 40, 47, 57, 90-92, 94, 96, 
98, 99, lOi, 103, 104, 111-113, 
127, 133, 176. See Friends 

Quietists, 45, 49, I33 

Ranters, 94 

Reformation, 12, 16, 20, 23, 31, 
32, 39, 52, 53, 68, 70, 71, 74, 
76, 82, 113, 123, 171 
, counter, 19, 35 
in England, 31, 35, 36, 38, 82 
in Germany, 15, 25, 34, 40 
Regeneration, 16, 25, 26, 41, in 
Renaissance, 7, 18, 137 
Reuchlin, Johann, 8 
Richard of St. Victor, 3 
Ritschl, 58 
Roach, Richard, 106* 



Robinson, John, 38, 39 
Rogers, John, 42 
RoUe, Richard, 3, 32, 48 
Romanticism, chapter VI 
Rosicrucians, 2, 16, 18, 21, 22, 

50, 78, 81, 98, 99, 107 
Rous, Francis, 45 
Royal Society, 64, 76, 79, 80, 107, 

122 
Rutherford, Samuel, 46* 
Ruysbroeck, 5, 48 



Sachse, 107*, 108* 
Sacraments, 14, 29, 103, 167 
Saints, 53, 54, 83 
Saltmarsh, 47, no 
ScheUing, 175 
Schenkendorf, 177 
Schlegels, The, 175 
Schleiermacher, 162 
Schneider, 17* 
Scholasticism, 23 
Schopenhauer, 175 
Schwenkfeld, 5, 12, 13, 25, 30, 

67, 84, 97 
Scriptures. See Bible 
Sedgwick, William, no 
Seekers, 89, 94, 97, 100, loi, 112 
Selden, 62, 122 
Sendivogius, 63 
Separatists, 40, 68, 98, I30 
Shakspere, 173, 178 
Shorthouse, J. H., 49* 
Sippell, Theodor, 47*, 100*, 

loi*, 103* 
Sloane MS., 68*, 69* 73*, 77"^, 

84*, 85*, 86*, 88*, 89*, 90* 
Socrates, 61 
Societies, fraternal, 21-23, 63, 

64, 69-74, 103, 104, 113 
Socinianism, 54, 67 
Spanheim, Ezekiel, 22, 117 
Sparrow, John, 56, 58, 63 
Spenser, Edmund, 4 
Sperber, Julius, 98 
State. See Church. 
Stern, 117*, 121* 126* 
Stiefel, Jesaias, 98 



200 



Index 



Storm and Stress, 176, 179, 181 
Suso, Heinrich, 4, 5, 48 

Tauler, 4, 6, 12, 13, 14, 31, 44, 45, 

48, 84 
Taylor, Edmund, 105 
Taylor, Thomas, loi 
Theologia Germanica, 5, 13, 31, 

44, 45, 49, 91 
Theosophical Brotherhood, 133 
Theosophy, 52, 92 
Thomson, 173 
Tieck, 175, 178 
Todd, 133* 
Toland, 115 
Toleration, 21, 23, 35, 43, 67, 108, 

112, 128, 131, 132, 134, 164, 

167 
Travers, Rebecca, loi 
Trevisanus, 63 
Trinity, 132, 144, 146 
Troeltsch, 30, 44, 46, 64, 103* 
Truth, 6, 13, 51, 52, 77*, 102, 

138 
Tryon, Thomas, 108, 109* 
Tulloch, John, 51* 

Underhill, Evelyn, 3*, 6*, 48* 
Underhill, Thom.as, 99 

Valentinus, Basilius, 10, 77* 
Vane, Sir Henry, iii, 126, 134 



Vanists, 94 

Vaughan, Thomas, 51, 78 

Vittel, Christopher, 42 

Waite, A. E., 78* 

Waldenses, 71, 104 

Walthar, Balthazar, 96 

Ward, 93* 

Webbe, Joseph, 79 

Weckherlin, 122, 126 

Weigel, 13, 14, 15, 25, 30, 51, 84, 

98, 152* 
Weigelians, 67, 97 
Weingarten, 19*, 40*, 55*, no*, 

127* 
Wense, Wilhelm von der, 22 
Wesley, John, no 
Will, 7, 26, 141, 145, 146 
Williams, Roger, 127, 133 
Winstanley, Gerrard, 112, 113 
Witchcraft, 10, 52 
Wolf, Lucien, 89* 
a Wood, 79*, 95* 
Wordsworth, 175 
Worthington, 72, 73, 78*, 83, 

87*, 90*, 93* 
Wyclif, 37 

Young, 173, 179, 180, 181 

Zimmermann, Johann Jakob, 

107 
Zwingli, 32 



VITA 

The writer was born November 5, 1880, in Wellsboro, 
Pennsylvania. She was graduated from the Wellsboro High 
School in 1898, from Cornell University, with the A.B. 
degree, in 1903. Fifteen months, beginning with the 
summer of 1903, she spent in Germany, mainly in Leipzig, 
studying German under private tutors. In 1905 she 
took the normal course in Swedish gymnastics at Posse 
Gymnasium, Boston. 1906-9 she taught German and gym- 
nastics in Lawrence College, Appleton, Wisconsin. In 1909 
she was given a scholarship at the University of Illinois, 
where she took the A.M. degree in 1910, presenting a thesis 
entitled Gottfried Arnold's " Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie " 
in Goethe's Intellectual Life. 1910-12 she was fellow in 
German at the University of Illinois, studying German 
Literature under Professor Julius Goebel, Professor O. E. 
Lessing, and Professor N. C. Brooks, and Philosophy under 
Professor B. H. Bode. In July, 1912, she was appointed to 
the Illinois Traveling Research Fellowship, and spent the 
year 191 2- 13 in study in England and Germany. 



/: 



^ 



LBD'14 



m a 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




010 316 496 5 



^■'::.M 






« 












■ .1 ;•■ ; 



